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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?

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub is on Azure. Azure is notorious for being terrible. There was a post here recently from an ex-Azure engineer explaining all of this in a multi-part series. Edit: Found the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242

Isn't a lot of OpenAI infra also on Azure? They seem to be faring better than GitHub.

I bet OpenAI has failovers to other data centers. I think they have a variety of data center provides all over the place.

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

#62
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, but come on...

That's due to the need for ultra-fast memory and inference compute, it's not the same thing.

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

#63
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious answer is to end free unlimited private repos. Source is no longer a specific thing. GitHub is just a free S3 or Azure provider.

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.

GH isn't good enough to charge that much for its core services. 90% of its user base would just find better or cheaper alternatives, and the only ones remaining would be legacy enterprise codebases that are just impossible or too expensive to migrate.

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

#64
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to that graph, performance drops widely after Microsoft's acquisition before AI enters the scene. If not Microsoft, how else do you explain it, or is the graph somehow misleading?

You're the one making the argument! You need to show causality instead of correlation.

I've made no argument at all. I'm asking a question to a person who made the claim that "Microsoft acquiring GitHub is not a valid root cause analysis."

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

#65
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…

My sense is that a lot of this activity isn't even legitimate use. As one example: my company has a GitHub app, and last night some bot added my app to 1700 repos. Then the bot immediately started rapid-firing commits which each affected hundreds of files, triggering a deluge of GitHub webhooks to my servers.

The repo names all matched other GitHub apps, so my sense is this bot had added 1700 GitHub apps to 1700 repos, with that number rapidly increasing at the upper bound of whatever GitHub's rate limit is.

My systems caught it quickly and auto-booted the bot, but the whole situation is ridiculous.

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

#66
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…

My sense is that a lot of this activity isn't even legitimate use. As one example: my company has a GitHub app, and last night some bot added my app to 1700 repos. Then the bot immediately started rapid-firing commits which each affected hundreds of files, triggering a deluge of GitHub webhooks to my servers. The repo names all matched other GitHub apps, so my sense is this bot had added 1700 GitHub apps to 1700 repo…

there's this attack on youtube where people who dont want their real names known will autoblock comments with their real names; bots will spam comments with every word and note the ones that were not visible.

kinda reminds me of it. not my most valuable contribution to forensics, admittedly.

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't a lot of OpenAI infra also on Azure? They seem to be faring better than GitHub.

I bet OpenAI has failovers to other data centers. I think they have a variety of data center provides all over the place.

There's already a noun for this: "resources"

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

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, OK so then use the additional revenue to add more resources and employees? What the f*k are they doing over there?

> OK so then use the additional revenue to add more resources and employees? What revenue? I'd assume the people pushing thousands of AI-generated commits are not the people paying for GitHub Enterprise.

> What revenue

I'd assume at least a portion of them are paying for GitHub Pro, and by now at least a small % would have converted to Enterprise.

If not, then they need to fix their operational model - I don't understand people acting like this is some insurmountable challenge given Microsoft reported over $331 billion in total revenue and an operating income exceeding $155 billion in 2026.

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, OK so then use the additional revenue to add more resources and employees? What the f*k are they doing over there?

What revenue do AI-boosted commits provide? Am I missing something?

You're missing the fact that Microsoft reported over $331 billion in total revenue and an operating income exceeding $155 billion - this is a fixable problem.

If they're really that cash-strapped at GitHub, then are they planning to just continue allowing this to happen and drown, or fix the issues? This has been ongoing for over a year.

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