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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?

#161

Post by conartist6 »

tibbar wrote: post #152
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 th…

May I just leave this for you here? https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...

A technical foundation is not infinitely strong. Put a big enough castle on a swamp, and it will sink into the swamp.

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

#162

Post by martinald »

llama052 wrote: post #143

Github Status: Incident with GitHub.com Aug 17, 21:15 UTC Resolved - On August 17, 2026, from 13:28–21:15 UTC (7h 47m), GitHub.com experienced elevated errors and latency across Issues, Pull Requests, APIs, Actions, and Copilot. At peak, web/API error rates were approximately 20%, while archive and raw-content downloads reached approximately 50%. SAML/OIDC authentication, SCIM, and Team Sync were also affected, as we…

I don't think it was the bad code pushes itself, it was another new peak in traffic that exhausted load balancers that then caused retry storms internally in a badly configured plugin (in VS code).

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

#163

Post by 27183 »

etc-hosts wrote: post #136
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.

Every response from GitHub must be deterministic. OpenAI and Anthropic do not have this problem.

OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Gemeni, etc also have another escape hatch: they can arbitrarily and potentially invisibly reduce your quality of service at their discretion. They can choose to route your request to an expensive model or a cheap one. By contrast, the best Github can do is slow your request down.

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

#165

Post by ionwake »

I remember someone in that place telling me "i cant mention AI in my plans because they will laugh at me".

That was about 2 years ago. Im not kidding.

I dont know what the moral of the story is, but I found it weird at the time ( for added context - i was using AI back then about 10 hours a day, BUT I think sentiment on HN was "still" around the vibe of "you use AI to code without checking every line? I doubt your projects work" - but I had nothing better to do then wrestle with it and was surprised how I hadnt checked my code in weeks but stuff "worked". Its much better now and agents are accepted ofcourse but it sort of "snuck up" on people even in the tech community as recently as that.

I guess what Im saying is time is going quickly.

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

#166

Post by fl0id »

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…

anthropic frequently rate limits or is just unavailable... so I wouldn't exactly say they are handling it better.

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

#167

Post by Crusoe123 »

ionwake wrote: post #165

I remember someone in that place telling me "i cant mention AI in my plans because they will laugh at me". That was about 2 years ago. Im not kidding. I dont know what the moral of the story is, but I found it weird at the time ( for added context - i was using AI back then about 10 hours a day, BUT I think sentiment on HN was "still" around the vibe of "you use AI to code without checking every line? I doubt your pr…

So you're spamming github with slop and actual good code can't be merged? Got it.

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

#168

Post by lokar »

Illniyar wrote: post #112
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…

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 y…

A good rule of thumb I once heard (from Jeff Dean, I think) was that (in a complex system) every 10X you go up in scale you need to re-consider basic design elements, trade-offs, etc, and probably change some of them.

It's hard to design something (large and complex) for much more than 10X scale with only HW capacity increases.

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

#170

Post by zmj »

SoftTalker wrote: post #38
arjie wrote: 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.

The incentives that creates are really bad: it encourages users to organize their code across the smallest number of repos, and I'd bet anything that larger repos are disproportionately more expensive for GitHub than smaller ones. It's very possible that a per-repo charge would make things worse.
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