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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?

#261

Post by sosodev »

esperent wrote: post #251
sosodev wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSR that is javascript native, sure. This is still Ruby doing the rendering.

What's the difference? If it's SSR it's happening on the server, the only benefit of using JS is ergonomics. Ruby is fine otherwise.

Ruby can't render React code. JavaScript can. With GitHub it seems that they sometimes can do SSR for the React bits, but that must mean that they're invoking a JavaScript interpreter within the Ruby process. Which means they have the overhead of two runtimes and the jank that comes with the IPC between the two.

It's just pointless hacks on hacks. GitHub didn't need React on the frontend and any potential resource savings of client side rendering were lost when they realized they need to do SSR on that stuff too.

I've encountered so much frontend jank as they expanded that portion of the stack whereas it was always excellent when it was just Ruby SSR and minimal JS on the frontend.

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

#264

Post by phailhaus »

sosodev wrote: post #180
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…

They didn't leave the architecture alone, right? They shoved React in and created a weird SSR + React frankenstein that is objectively worse in many ways.

And yet, the React/SSR infra has never gone down.

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

#265

Post by jaredsohn »

ornornor wrote: post #104
moralestapia wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Q. how can someone publish an article like that, with their name, etc... Don't they sign NDAs? Do they not care? Are they not enforceable? Very curious to know.

Maybe they didn’t take the severance part that makes the NDA valid? IIRC for an NDA to be enforceable there has to be a monetary consideration to it. Or maybe it’s for no competes?

NDAs often get signed when you join a company.

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

#266

Post by bmitc »

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…

Maybe they should have planned on that when they went all in on Copilot stuff several years ago? Even the GitHub organization is under the larger Cloud/AI organization at Microsoft.

Further, it is clear that Microsoft and GitHub have been strongly encouraging, if not requiring, AI tool use in their own, internal development. I have seen several automated PRs within GitHub repos that were 100% done by AI. Big surprise where that's leading.

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

#267

Post by [deleted] »

gspr wrote: post #238
never_inline wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also limit number of free commits to, say 100 per month.

So if I want to push an existing project with 1000 commits to GitHub for the first time, I gotta do it over the course of 10 months? Encouraging big commits seems antithetical to the idea of git in general.

[deleted]

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

#270

Post by dgellow »

owebmaster wrote: post #256
dgellow wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think their engineers « learn the codebase » anymore, that’s so 2025. It’s all agentic now, the model learns the codebase, the engineer ask the agents to do their best and believe in themselves

Missing the /s? This behavior is what led them to the current situation and will only get worse.

I want to say it’s sarcastic, but it’s actually what people are doing IRL!
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