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GitHub is sinking

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Re: GitHub is sinking

#131
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you care to cite your source that GitHub does not apply rate limits to unauthenticated requests?

The parent's experience which mirrors my own - on a clean residential IP that hasn't sent any traffic I hit that "rate-limit" on my first request to the commits list view. So there is no rate-limit, it's a default deny for unauthenticated requests... which could be fine but at least update the error message to reflect that.

It's a rate limit of 0 RPS to that endpoint

Re: GitHub is sinking

#133
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will gradually authwall everything they can. Just look at linkedin.

Wouldn't this break Go and other build systems (npm?) that pull packages from github by default? Not that I endorse the practise, but will Microsoft really kick out such a big class of users?

It does break it, from experience authorizing the pulls with a bot user fixes it.

In the case were the build happens from a github action there are standard builtin credential (workflow permissions).

https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/rate-limi...

Re: GitHub is sinking

#134
I left Github because of some very strange activity. I had a new folder named "feature" added to one of my repos. At the time I had failed to turn off the AI integrations, so I figured that was the problem.

There is no way I'm going to let a VCS put code into one of my repos without my asking for it or consent. Full stop. I moved all my significant code to codeberg but kept the github account, so my username doesn't get squatted.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#135
post #8

Everyone wants to pin this on the Microsoft acquisition or incompetence but it seems pretty clear to me from the material GitHub has posted that AI has 10xed the amount of code being committed to GH, which has downstream effects everywhere - CI, Actions, code ingestion, everywhere. The author pins it on weird things like MS Copilot, which kind of feels like he’s listing off things he doesn’t like rather than casual f…

If load has increased so much so rapidly then GitHub should be rate limiting as needed instead of basically letting people DoS them.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#136
post #4

I went to look at a repo on Github today. Clicked on the "xxx commits" link to see the commit history, and got told I've hit a secondary rate limit and need to wait. I'm the only person on this network that would even look at Github, and my connection has a dedicated IP, no CGN.

The only real way to browse the site is to be logged in.

sadly even that isn't an option for me. i spent half an hour yesterday trying to create a github account. i couldn't. my @proton.me got rejected. captchas take several painful minutes to complete. and even when I did manage to create an account (at least the page displayed a success mesage), it got disabled the instant I logged in for "TOS violation". i wish i was joking, but i literally cannot create a github account. a few years ago this would have seemed crazy. but here we are.

i'm stuck having to use google (another pain in the ass) for discovering codebases that contain specific snippets. but some repo contents (such as wikis) are not exposed at all to search engines

Re: GitHub is sinking

#137
post #8

Everyone wants to pin this on the Microsoft acquisition or incompetence but it seems pretty clear to me from the material GitHub has posted that AI has 10xed the amount of code being committed to GH, which has downstream effects everywhere - CI, Actions, code ingestion, everywhere. The author pins it on weird things like MS Copilot, which kind of feels like he’s listing off things he doesn’t like rather than casual f…

10x the code? Easy solution. Throttle unpaid customers or put a quota.

Either way, paid customers should not be affected.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#138

So, what's the actual real alternative ? The one that also supports open source projects ? Ironically gitlab is costlier than github, and not without their faults, but that's "maybe" the only other alternative here, anything else ?

have you read the submission? have of it is a list of alternatives

Re: GitHub is sinking

#140

I would not be surprised if AI commits are the culprit. There is no way any service would cope with a constant stream of unfettered commits by sleepless always-on agents. Ironically, this same strategy seems to be what GH/MS (and other big companies) are evangelizing - and therefore dying by their own hand (in a way).

Yes this is confirmed. Github activity surged about 10x in the past year: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)

GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.

So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub’s core features.

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