GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search

When you have issues in different repos but in the same board it seems very confusing that you can create them and then have to assign them to a repo for them to move out of being a Draft issue (well maybe it is not an issue yet rather a task). Maybe I'm using it wrong but I found this pretty strange. Most projects will have a backend and frontend repo certainly when building an app so I think not being able to manage issues against both projects made things a bit strange. Maybe I should use a different blank mono repo just for issues but then I imaging the integration with PRs and commit messages breaks.

Additionally I want to be able to have #PROJ-0002 style IDs for tasks, so for example I can add messages for tasks that affect both repos (e.g. "Imported types from GraphQL API into app (#BACKEND-1234, #FRONTEND-1234)") just having numbers is very limited and slightly confusing.

I think of GitHub as a sad story. There are probably going to be at least 3 public companies that should have "just" been GitHub features: GitLab (GitHub Enterprise), Sourcegraph (search), and Linear (GitHub Issues). There are dozens of upstarts "unbundling" features of GitHub that are genuinely useful, but which are under-loved and under-invested in, and surely some of those will become successful too. It feels like GitHub continuously invents the future, and then waits for someone else to make it truly great.

It is so painful to watch because I love GitHub so much. I graduated college in 2013, which means I started programming right when they got started. I read their dev blog every single day, eagerly waiting for new features (which were released every couple days). I watched their team page grow, I looked carefully at what they did to deserve a spot at such a cool company. I scoured the projects they contributed back to for hints about what good code looked like (my favorite was Vicent Martí's contributions to libgit2). I eagerly taught my friends how to use git because university taught subversion. I wrote my own Rails tutorials as a way to learn the magic.

But it's been years now, and it's not an easy love. It's work! It's so painful to watch it get continuously lapped by upstarts. I always just thought the core offerings (Pull Requests and Issues) would get better eventually. And now, 14 years later, they finally are. But very slowly. I really want to believe, but after 16 years, it is starting to sink in that GitHub might just be a place to store files.

The magic is still in there. I think there are lots of people like me, who want to believe. But it will take real agency to do it, and that's really hard to muster at this stage in a company's life.

FWIW, this specific feature - what they are now calling sub-issues - is actually better described as a framework for modeling proper parent-child relationships in their system, which is something quite hard to get right, mainly because it has to work somehow with the existing issues feature set. People building this feature from scratch (e.g. Linear) have it trivial to solve, because they didn't have any backwards compatibility issue to worry about. This is, of course, absolutely Github's fault for not designing it to accomodate such a thing easily in the first place, but the people who built this feature are probably not the same people who made that original decision.

They've been working on some version of this feature for several years now in various iterations. I believe this is either their third or fourth attempt to get it right - I was trialing a beta of some previous iteration of it a few years ago and it was incomplete/not fully well thought out which must be why they dropped it. I'd trust the feature here at least to be decent now, because of how many attempts they've had at it.

But yeah if I was a company like Zenhub I would be probably a bit worried at this announcement since it is almost inevitable that this specific feature is going to be enough for people to no longer need third party management of issues. I know in a previous company I worked for that specific feature (proper parent-child relationships) was the reason they used Zenhub, and same for my current company using Linear.

Yes this is one of the reasons this discussion is so tricky. I just believe that if I maintain a popular project on GitHub I should not be automatically consigned to worst-in-class experiences for Issues and code review. I understand this is mildly controversial but I have had maintainer status on a few top 0.01% GitHub repositories and I have seen tools that do not suck, and so my opinion is that a better world is possible.

Again, I say all of this entirely with love. I love GitHub. I have used GitHub since I started programming. I want them to win.