Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub is sinking

dbushell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 176 posts

Re: GitHub is sinking

#141

Post by robroyce »

IshKebab wrote: post #96
egwor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use gitlab at work, and I have to say that it is disappointing. The UI is so complicated to do the simplest things (e.g. to approve a MR you need to click a button that is actually a menu; the diffs are difficult to read; the 'To-do list' includes MRs that were already merged (how is that actionable?)) and it seems that they're struggling to turn around improvements quickly. The issue around the 'To-do list' inclu…

> to approve a MR you need to click a button that is actually a menu It's not really any better on Github. Why do I have to click on "Files changed" to approve a PR? Overall I would say it is on par with Github. Worse in some ways; better in others.

[dead]

Re: GitHub is sinking

#142

Post by tristanj »

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. 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.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#144

Post by fwlr »

johnfn wrote: 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…

Why have they not simply asked the 800lb gorilla to solve this problem for them?

Re: GitHub is sinking

#145

Post by gofreddygo »

johnfn wrote: 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…

For upstarts, individuals, artists and idealists, Github was a means to reach and distribute code reliably to a large number of people on the planet. Is that true today? Will it ever?

97% of code coming in is AI slop. It's owned by an evil, rent seeking corp. Reliability is a flaming dumpster fire. And everything you commit there will be used to train more AI.

Github _is_ sinking.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#146

Post by abraham »

chilmers wrote: post #78
einsteinx2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The graph in TFA shows the downtime pattern starting in January 2020. OpenAI released GPT-3.5 in November 2022 (basically December), and LLM/agentic coding didn’t really kick off in the way you’re describing until 2024, but really in 2025. How can that explain the terrible uptime for the ~4 years post acquisition before all the AI stuff you’re talking about started?

The graph is not accurate, because GitHub's historical downtime data is not accurate. For example, here is a Hacker News story about GitHub being down on July 28th 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12178449 Here's GitHub's historical uptime graph (on which this chart is based), saying there was no recorded downtime that day, or in fact that entire month: https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=40

GitHub launched a new status page Dec 2018[1]. It doesn't appear as if any history before Oct 2018 was ported over.

[1] https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/introducing-t... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20181211191456/https://www.githu...

Re: GitHub is sinking

#147

Post by starkparker »

chilmers wrote: post #78
einsteinx2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The graph in TFA shows the downtime pattern starting in January 2020. OpenAI released GPT-3.5 in November 2022 (basically December), and LLM/agentic coding didn’t really kick off in the way you’re describing until 2024, but really in 2025. How can that explain the terrible uptime for the ~4 years post acquisition before all the AI stuff you’re talking about started?

The graph is not accurate, because GitHub's historical downtime data is not accurate. For example, here is a Hacker News story about GitHub being down on July 28th 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12178449 Here's GitHub's historical uptime graph (on which this chart is based), saying there was no recorded downtime that day, or in fact that entire month: https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=40

That graph has bugged me since it went viral. The methodology is horseshit: https://github.com/DaMrNelson/github-historical-uptime

Just dumping HARs from devtools from a status site that hallucinates 100% uptime when it has no data. For example, all GitHub services had 100% uptime in June 1996: https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=200

The graph gives GitHub Actions 100% uptime before it launched to GA in November 2019. That factors into the average uptime for every month on the graph before that. It's fully horseshit.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#148

Post by quyleanh »

johnfn wrote: 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…

Totally agree. People’re saying Microsoft this, Microsoft that with their Microsoft hate, but they ignore the fact that AI trend making GitHub worse, and GitHub is trying to fix.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#149

Post by bigstrat2003 »

ako wrote: post #73
georgemcbay wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's basically proof how well AI works these days. Give it a few months so they can scale and it'll get better. Remember Twitter fail whale? Growth pains that can and will be solved. GitHub's problems can technically be solved, but that doesn't mean they can be solved in a way where the economics still work out. If AI use is 10x-ing the amount of infrastructure costs for GitHub but not 10x-ing the amount of money M…

Yah, the monitization bit is challanging. I'll ask my agent to click some of the ads GitHub serves it ;-) But getting this infrastructure right is crucial for a future where most of the code is AI generated. GitHub puts microsoft in a good position to experiment and learn how to optimize GitHub (enterprise) for the future. Nate b Jones on youtube, https://youtu.be/FDkvRl1RlT0?si=AEYlUchm_oalMSzf , argues that Atlassi…

> But getting this infrastructure right is crucial for a future where most of the code is AI generated.

If that is the future, then source code hosting will be the least of our worries. The entire industry will collapse because the software will stop working.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#150

Post by xantronix »

pixl97 wrote: post #120
xantronix wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think Microsoft ought to have thought a bit more about scale? They're not just innocent bystanders here. GitHub Copilot is a first class citizen of GitHub and so of course a lot of private enterprises are going to be using the thing that's bundled with the other thing.

Pray tell where are they going to get memory from?

They're part of the circular AI finance economy, I'm sure they can figure it out.
Post reply on HN