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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?

#111

Post by roughly »

srmatto wrote: post #88
sharts wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would take what C-level execs say with a grain of salt. Remember these folks hire people with plenty of system design experience. They likely also have the money for hardware resources. If load was an issue these things would have been solved already. Or they are purposely causing millions of dollars of productivity loss daily by not solving this. Something more serious is at play. And I want to hear from the actua…

Infra is a cost center for a business unless your a PaaS and even then maybe still. Cost centers are usually ferreted out for savings, not investment.

Infra is a cost center right up until its absence begins to undercut your value proposition to customers, and then it becomes an investment. GitHub seems well on the wrong side of that equation right now.

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

#112

Post by Illniyar »

sharts wrote: post #74
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 would take what C-level execs say with a grain of salt. Remember these folks hire people with plenty of system design experience. They likely also have the money for hardware resources. If load was an issue these things would have been solved already. Or they are purposely causing millions of dollars of productivity loss daily by not solving this. Something more serious is at play. And I want to hear from the actua…

More load does not just mean needing to increase capacity, which would be simple for Microsoft to do.

Additional load reveals limits and breaklines that were never known before - your temporary integer IDs are suddenly too small, you reach the maximum file descriptors in a Linux distro, your hash function suddenly has repeating conflicts, your DB index is suddenly oversaturated.

Having massive exponential growth of your traffic would probably require constant refactoring to meet the ever changing system limits.

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

#113

Post by fallingbananna »

herpdyderp wrote: post #2

non-helpful answer: the "Microsoft Acquires GitHub" line in this graph answers all questions https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

To be fair, before the aquisition, GitHub was super stable, but also it felt like they rarely changed or added anything.

After Microsoft acquired them, they started rolling out new features at an incredible pace. And if you look at the breakdown of the downtime, most of the downtime is in features that didn't exist before the acquisition.

Though not all of the downtime is in new features. The core is also less stable than ever.

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

#114

Post by maccard »

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’s reliability issues started earlier than the boom in agentic coding they talk about. I have comments on here from 2025 talking about massive outages with actions and issues.

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

#115

Post by maccard »

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…

For a very long time this year Claude was down multiple times a week. Can’t speak for OpenAI

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

#118

Post by stronglikedan »

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…

Open AI and Claude were not nearly as mature as Github when the boom started. That's a lot of legacy infra to scale up.

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

#119

Post by meerita »

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 can't believe they've been asleep all these months, not foreseeing that AI would generate more commits and Git usage and, consequently, not preparing themselves to scale.
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