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GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

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Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#31

Post by jauntywundrkind »

As tools I see no real issue, as agents seem readily able to coordinate and work alongside people, using these same tools. Same for the other forges. The offerings differ but there's vastly more isomorphism, sameness than difference.

What seems much harder to me is the coordination model at large, that we stick forever with one source of all authority who is the sole owner arbitrator and gate for all things. In corporate maybe that keeps going and that is a huge huge bulk of sw dev.

But I think we have so much more potency & capability, that a single coherent frontier for the software is an organizational constraint that won't be the only means forever. Letting ideas bake and marinate and cross pollinate and fork... With such vast new capability & power I feel like a single tip or one or two is going to dislodge as the only big pattern.

I see works like https://v-it.org, and in that I see not the new world, but new multitudes. And that's better!

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#32

Post by catlifeonmars »

weitendorf wrote: post #14
cortesoft wrote: post #4

I don't feel like this article really answers the question of why this is the wrong shape. CI takes too long? What else? You can make your CI less intensive, that doesn't require a different Github. What features would a 'differently shaped' platform have?

I'm not going to pretend I know how to do Github better than Github, but I almost can't believe how poor their support is for fine grained access tokens, org/individual credentials, etc. are in the same era as Copilot/VSCode/AI devtools and vibe coding, as they drown in a rapidly growing volume of agent-driven usage. It's going to keep growing way past how it is now. I often drive 4-8 agents at a time, many in the cl…

> I'm not going to pretend I know how to do Github better than Github

To be fair, there are lots of forges that are better than GitHub; knowing how to GitHub better than GitHub is an extremely low bar.

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#34

Post by weitendorf »

ryandrake wrote: post #18
gerdesj wrote: post #5

"I think of GitHub as a collaboration tool." Well yes but git itself is the tool at the base of the pyramid you call GitHub and co. It seems you actively want git to look like all the other things you are used to and they are all walled gardens. GitHub takes git and basically turns it back into subversion and co. Instead of all that anarchic "no repo is king" long haired hippie nonsense, you want central control 8) I…

Yea, I keep saying: "Git doesn't need a hub." One of the greatest features of git is that it is not reliant on a centralized repo! Why graft centralization onto a tool that doesn't want it? The non-git features of GitHub, like actions and CI and the issue tracker and all that stuff are fine, but I'd argue don't really belong as part of your source control system. If you need that stuff, you should be able to pick and…

99.9% of clients are behind NAT or working on code owned by someone other than just themselves. Unless your "decentralized" repos are on two devices you control on the same private network, or you think carrying hard drives around to your friends' computers manually is a reasonable way to do it, or your decentralized version control is distributed over a centralized companies' email services, this is such a hard problem to solve

When people start thinking about what it would take for their friend to pull their repo from their home computer, they almost always decide they'd rather let Microsoft host some of their code for ~free. Actually making code accessible from a computer you own on the Internet takes way more money, time, and risk than whatever you'll pay them.

I mean how do you handle authorization and connectivity from remote clients, you go to a PGP key signing ceremony and set up a firewall and buy a static IP and/or domain and host it on a server?

Maybe instead you use some signin technology designed for centralized enterprises to manage, and a third party idp host, or a vps on someone's cloud signing access tokens? If you send it over email on a domain you don't own then you're strictly worse off, because a big company is getting all your code anyway and you made everything more annoying for no benefit. Do you also host your own email, and rotate ssh keys across all your devices, and set up linux users on your friends' servers or your various personal-use servers across the world, in the year of our lord 2026?

If you're just making code accessible as read-only files accessible over the Internet it's a little easier, you get hammered by bots and humans will probably never discover it organically unless you're a centralized company, but at least you don't have to let anybody try to authenticate. You can argue that it's still technically distributed, but not in the way people mean when talking about version control, unless you think Facebook is also distributed.

TBH I can't see how anybody who has even considered letting people use ssh keys to push code to a personally-owned/operated internet-exposed server, for anything that mattered enough to care, and say that git "doesn't want" centralization.

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#35

Post by Multicomp »

gerdesj wrote: post #28
Cpoll wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> issue tracker I contend that issues/tickets are as much a part of the code as comments and commit messages, and tightening the link is valuable, especially when you need to decide whether to take down an old fence. Which is a conundrum, because I agree about choosing your tools.

I absolutely agree with you that the paraphernalia around code is required but tools for the job. git for code management something else for discussion of that management

why not something like fossil scm but built around git itself?

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#37

Post by skydhash »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #11
emadabdulrahim wrote: post #9

A lot of words, but essentially says nothing useful. If GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world. Well, show me a hint of what the new world should look like? To me it seems like everyone is frustrated, mostly at how fast things are changing, but not necessary because the existing tools suddenly became trash/irrelevant. A lot of us are still contending with the fact that large amount of code is being produced and…

My personal take is that if you want to scale in engineering you really only have 2 options. 1) you start acting like a senior staff level engineer and you stop caring so much about implementation and start caring about the things that actually matter, the architecture, the performance profile, the scalability, the test coverage, the monitoring, the velocity of development, etc etc. Or 2) you don't scale. LLMs can wr…

> you stop caring so much about implementation and start caring about the things that actually matter, the architecture, the performance profile, the scalability, the test coverage, the monitoring, the velocity of development

What architecture doesn’t care about implementation? What performance profile doesn’t care about the details of the implementation? What does the test coverage is about if it’s not the implementation? What are you monitoring? The specs or the implementation?…

Not caring about the implementation seems like not caring about the materials when building an house, with eyes stayed only glued to a novel’s like description of the house.

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#38

Post by bengold14 »

emadabdulrahim wrote: post #9

A lot of words, but essentially says nothing useful. If GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world. Well, show me a hint of what the new world should look like? To me it seems like everyone is frustrated, mostly at how fast things are changing, but not necessary because the existing tools suddenly became trash/irrelevant. A lot of us are still contending with the fact that large amount of code is being produced and…

I couldn't agree more. I've been building something that is trying to solve this problem, an abstraction layer for code that you, your agents and co-workers can all use together. I would love the chance to talk to you and get feedback if you're willing.

My email is in my bio

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#39

Post by weitendorf »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #32
weitendorf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to pretend I know how to do Github better than Github, but I almost can't believe how poor their support is for fine grained access tokens, org/individual credentials, etc. are in the same era as Copilot/VSCode/AI devtools and vibe coding, as they drown in a rapidly growing volume of agent-driven usage. It's going to keep growing way past how it is now. I often drive 4-8 agents at a time, many in the cl…

> I'm not going to pretend I know how to do Github better than Github To be fair, there are lots of forges that are better than GitHub; knowing how to GitHub better than GitHub is an extremely low bar.

There are two that I know of, and neither seem to do a better job at solving my problem of providing a place to host and distribute open source software.

I hosted my own forgejo server used by actual other people * very slightly* before it was cool, and just to get started I had to go through this giant list of configs governing important auth/cred stuff and also random ass features and everything else, then I set up auth using my existing reverse proxy, then I had to figure out how to use JWT for access via the git CLI because I wasn't going to give every client an ssh key to The Server with All the Code or coordinate all that.

Then, finally, it all worked and I thought I'd check out the CI or some of the other interesting features I had heard of/seen like static site hosting. After looking into those and how mature they were, I realized this was really only for hobbyists, or people who want to make hosting git repos a part time job but also don't use/care/know about the stuff that makes a "forge" more than just a git server.

Personally, I liked the idea of self-hosting a forge with the assumption I could trust it as a CI service, and maybe allow unauthenticated read access, and have good authorization/authentication for my collaborators. I had a ton of 3p git repos to host and 1p repos to test on so it made sense to try since Github is not meant for that use case. I also evaluated gitea and saw they were offering a commercial multitenant service where my 3p hosting wouldn't be welcome and even otherwise I'd basically be at odds with them, and gitlab but they wanted me to run a whole damn cluster and felt a little too 2018.

If you're Codeberg and run the project it could be worth investing in making it better, but then you're literally making it your full time job. I wasn't going to make mine doing container stuff for them though. To their credit I checked their docs on just now and it seems to be in much better shape.

I went back to github because I like paying $5 or whatever for something that works, has many people on it, a bunch of integrations and generally enough quality to put in front of paying customers, and is secure. It's an insane value for anybody who has priorities higher than hosting their own git forge. So I think pretty much nobody knows how to do Github better than Github.

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#40

Post by da_chicken »

ryandrake wrote: post #18
gerdesj wrote: post #5

"I think of GitHub as a collaboration tool." Well yes but git itself is the tool at the base of the pyramid you call GitHub and co. It seems you actively want git to look like all the other things you are used to and they are all walled gardens. GitHub takes git and basically turns it back into subversion and co. Instead of all that anarchic "no repo is king" long haired hippie nonsense, you want central control 8) I…

Yea, I keep saying: "Git doesn't need a hub." One of the greatest features of git is that it is not reliant on a centralized repo! Why graft centralization onto a tool that doesn't want it? The non-git features of GitHub, like actions and CI and the issue tracker and all that stuff are fine, but I'd argue don't really belong as part of your source control system. If you need that stuff, you should be able to pick and…

Git doesn't need a hub.

But, even though the Linux the project created git specifically for their own workflow, and is in the running for the largest and most complicated decentralized software project ever known, they still operate git.kernel.org. They still have a central master repository server.

Just because git clone gets you a first class copy of the repository doesn't mean you don't need a source of truth or a centralized master to operate and coordinate the project. Control is not the totality of the benefits of centralization, and we should not confuse the structure of the tool with the best structure of a project that uses that tool.

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