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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?

#151

Post by Peanuts99 »

traviswingo wrote: post #18
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…

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

I didn't think they'd completed the move yet, it's only partially on Azure - which to be fair could be another problem in itself.

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

#152

Post by tibbar »

qrush wrote: post #60

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.

The reality is that it's probably a skill issue. Scaling a mature platform 10x can be a really, really hard problem, they obviously don't have their arms around a solution, and are probably spending a majority of their time on ops to keep the bleeding down. In the old days you would have Jeff Dean come down from heaven and invent a new database for you or something like that. It doesn't really seem like Github has that kind of technical ability, so they're probably trying to cobble together Azure ops with internal bandaids while everyone internally is cranking out AI code and it's just not going to be enough.

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

#154

Post by 27183 »

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…

My pet theory is they backed themselves into a corner with Actions. That was a step change in computational scaling effort. It also fell immediately on the heels of the Microsoft acquisition.

Something about these two factors seems to have conspired to wreak absolute havoc on their uptime in the ~7yr hence. The AI slopocalypse hasn't helped matters, but the foundations were laid far earlier.

Would love to hear from an insider, either for or against this conspiracy theory.

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

#156

Post by sixothree »

odo1242 wrote: post #77
rep_movsd wrote: post #67

If you are doing 1000 commits a day, whats the point of git? Does the AI ever look back at the shit trail it left behind? Diffs are no longer diffs, they look like largescale delete and rewrite

AI definitely does look at git commit history in my experience

It's gotten me out of a few sticky merges by examining history and providing information about why changes were done.

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

#157

Post by conartist6 »

geodel wrote: post #133
roughly wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In general true. But most of paying customers, including enterprise have made a bet that they cut down expense and resources on operational experience, system management knowledge to minimum because cloud . So even if these cloud/SAAS solutions perform poorly it is not like customers have wherewithal to create alternate solutions.

> it is not like customers have wherewithal to create alternate solutions.

it's not impossible. they don't, right up until they do

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

#158

Post by conartist6 »

evanelias wrote: post #65
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…

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…

Yeah I think that's really important. The average value of each commit, action, or hook has become significantly lower, and that necessarily means that they can't spend on quality. If you set the quality bar to cater to the top 10% of value-creating users (us) the amount you'd pay for quality at times when quality matters none would truly and completely sink you

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

#159

Post by minraws »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #137
fooey wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're the uncontested market leader, you don't budget operations to be perfectly reliable, you budget to not be too unreliable. All those 9's are expensive after all. The AI boom caught them napping though, and they're slipping well into the too unreliable category

> The AI boom caught them napping though Microsoft, who invested eyewatering sums into AI, even near to betting the whole company on an AI boom, is surprised about the AI boom?

Microsoft bet everything on possible AGI, no one thought the result would be a bonafide commit printing machine.

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

#160

Post by cbeach »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #134

Github used to be built on mysql / redis / ruby on rails / C / shell, running on dedicated hardware. Microsoft left it like that after they acquired the company. Eventually, though, they decided to migrate the whole thing to Azure. And they were far enough through that to be basically committed... when AI coding started hitting them with much higher workloads. I personally think the reliability problems are more to d…

After their infamous "Fail Whale" outages, Twitter replaced its Ruby on Rails / MySQL stack with modern (at the time) technologies: Scala (functional language running on the JVM) / Finagle (RPC) / Thrift (framework) / Kafka (message queues) and this made Twitter stable under the load of several hundred million users.

Ruby is single-threaded, slow with poor GC and memory leaks. As Twitter's Alex Payne said publicly in 2008: "there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind that Ruby itself is slow" and that scaling Rails meant "just throw more instances at it"

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