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Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

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Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#51

Post by simonw »

logicchains wrote: post #31
tekno45 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI and Claude don't accept commits and host PRs? How are they the same?

They're undergoing the same kind of load. Almost every AI commit that's putting pressure on GitHub's servers was written on OpenAI and Anthropic's servers.

Scaling ChatGPT and scaling GitHub are very different problems.

For LLMs, prompt handling is effectively stateless. They do try to route follow-up prompts to the same cluster to benefit from prompt caching, but those can be effectively sharded. They also need to write results to storage but that's on a per-customer basis, so also easy to shard.

GitHub is a shared space, where commits and issues and PRs need to become instantly available to all readers across all geographies. They have a very different shape of scaling challenge to the LLM vendors.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#52

Post by hakunin »

odo1242 wrote: post #47
SoftTalker wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this would cut out a lot of the mindless commit activity. Charge $1/month per repo. If your project isn't worth that, run your own git or use another free forge.

I think GitHub leans on this free repos thing a lot for getting new users though. Like I could see people just moving to GitLab

…and encountering the same issues most likely.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#53

Post by fragmede »

tekno45 wrote: post #22
bhouston wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage? They are handling it a lot better than Github. Just because you have fast growth does not mean you can not handle it. Instead you have to realize that you are entering into a high growth phase and design around that…

OpenAI and Claude don't accept commits and host PRs? How are they the same?

Fundamentally, there's incoming requests, an application server, and a database. The devil is in the nature of those requests, and how do you process those requests and stick them in the database. And then serve them back out again. Different application, different database, but fundamentally, it's the same problem. Google managed to do this very well. Microsoft has not.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#54

Post by bhouston »

tekno45 wrote: post #22
bhouston wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage? They are handling it a lot better than Github. Just because you have fast growth does not mean you can not handle it. Instead you have to realize that you are entering into a high growth phase and design around that…

OpenAI and Claude don't accept commits and host PRs? How are they the same?

I am pretty sure OpenAI and Claude actually have a higher hardware cost per request that Microsoft. Github is actually most just a standard REST API app, although with some caching and git specific operations in the background. It is not as hardware intensive as GPU-based inference per quest with huge contexts and low latency.

Also Github's feature offering has been incredibly stable for the last 6 years. There isn't an excuse for it to be unstable like this.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#55

Post by pixelesque »

dumberquestions wrote: post #34
tekno45 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI and Claude don't accept commits and host PRs? How are they the same?

They're getting increasing demand for tokens at an accelerating pace.

Is that the same as storing state in a DB and on a filesystem though?

Like, I get there are other features they have, and things like history, but I don't think it's quite the same.

Isn't most (not all) of the LLM's resources stateless compute to a large degree?

(Not defending MS at all though, I currently can't create a PR on the required branch for my work (won't load the branch list) and their availability is really bad recently).

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#56

Post by adzuci »

tristanj wrote: post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

I think that data is a bit dated and misleading, but I would love to see if AI slop is a contributing factor here once the dust settles and how Github will address it. Looking at the return to mean in https://areyougoingexponential.rhys.dev/kdaigle makes me think the COO spike could be a Karpathy wiki or an agent too.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#57

Post by bhouston »

simonw wrote: post #51
logicchains wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're undergoing the same kind of load. Almost every AI commit that's putting pressure on GitHub's servers was written on OpenAI and Anthropic's servers.

Scaling ChatGPT and scaling GitHub are very different problems. For LLMs, prompt handling is effectively stateless. They do try to route follow-up prompts to the same cluster to benefit from prompt caching, but those can be effectively sharded. They also need to write results to storage but that's on a per-customer basis, so also easy to shard. GitHub is a shared space, where commits and issues and PRs need to become…

> GitHub is a shared space, where commits and issues and PRs need to become instantly available to all readers across all geographies. They have a very different shape of scaling challenge to the LLM vendors.

Github data is accessible by all (if open source), but they should be partition-able by individual repository (and their related forks.). Thus while there is more shared state across users, it isn't fully shared state.

And they have been working on this semi-shared state design for over 10 years now.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#58

Post by odo1242 »

hakunin wrote: post #52
odo1242 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GitHub leans on this free repos thing a lot for getting new users though. Like I could see people just moving to GitLab

…and encountering the same issues most likely.

Fair, but the point is GitHub’s model is:

Free Users use GitHub => when a company needs source control => all their coders use GitHub => company buys expensive enterprise contract.

If there’s less of an advantage to using free GitHub then that funnel works less effectively.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#59

Post by remus »

bhouston wrote: post #15
tristanj wrote: post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

> Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage? They are handling it a lot better than Github. Just because you have fast growth does not mean you can not handle it. Instead you have to realize that you are entering into a high growth phase and design around that…

> Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage?

By spending tens of billions in investor cash. It is not clear what a sustainable business model looks like for these companies at the moment.

> They are handling it a lot better than Github.

Are they? Anthropic has fairly frequent issues.

There's high growth and then there's demand increasing 10x in a year. For a mature business like github that's a massive, and I can't think of many big businesses who would be able to scale smoothly to accommodate that kind of demand.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#60

Post by qrush »

I got an "it is unacceptable" from their CPO on 8/7, and that they are "working around the clock on it".

https://x.com/mariorod1/status/2085800861469495465

I really think something deeper is going wrong there, and they're not being honest with their paying customers (and enterprises) about it.

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