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Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

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Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#251

The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride: > [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1] > [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the…

They should know that crap software is rarely intentional as they make it out to be in the initial version of the text, what you get is what they are able to build in the environment they are in (that matters too). Capability and environment.

I think the Reddit mobile website team might be the exception to that. What they make is a particular brand of unusable and from what I remember there is evidence of them talking about how that was intentional.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not exactly a role model when it comes to communication.

Perhaps he should be. This idea that we should tolerate terrible things and only respond to them politely seems to produce bad outcomes, for some mysterious reason.

The problem with that is always people.

Because one person is judging that "terribleness" before being entitled to flame, changes to that person influence their ability to objectively make that assessment.

Say, when their project becomes popular, they gain more power and fame, and suddenly their self-image is different.

Hence it usually being a more community-encouraging approach to keep discussions technical without vitriol.

Flaming is unnecessarily disruptive, not least because it gives other (probably not as talented) folks a license to also put their worst impulses to text.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say Github has any significant advantages over Gitlab in this regard? I always found them to be on par, with incremental advantages on either side.

One of my favourite GitHub features is the ability to do a code search over the whole of GitHub, not sure GitLab has the same when I use to use it?

Code search over all of Gitlab (even if available) wouldn't help much when many of the interesting repos might be on Github. To be truly useful, it would need to index repos across many different forges. But there's a tension in presenting that to users if you're afraid that they might exit your ecosystem to go to another forge.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#256

The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride: > [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1] > [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the…

I say this as someone who has been cautioning about Microsoft's ownership of GitHub for years now... but the Zig community has been high drama lately. I thought the Rust community had done themselves a disservice with their high tolerance of drama, but lately Zig seems to me to be more drama than even Rust.

I was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I could tell, seems like a possibly immature teenager. But to have a whole community gang up on you with pitch forks because they have a suspicion you might use AI... that was gross to watch.

I was already turned off by the constant Zig spam approach to marketing. But now that we're getting pitchfork mobs and ranty anti-AI diatribes it just seems like a community sustaining itself on negative energy. I think they can possibly still turn it around but it might involve cleaning house or instituting better rules for contributors.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#257
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you buy an e.V.?

Like how you buy a standards committee. Just research about Office formats' ISO standardization process. I'm not insinuating MicroSoft will buy Codeberg, but I just wanted to say that, they are not foreigners to the process itself.

Are there standards committees with 786 voting members, of which you would have to convince at least 2/3 to betray the ideals of the association they chose to actively take part in to get the association to disband or otherwise stop it from pursuing its mission?

I don't think your comparison works out.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not exactly a role model when it comes to communication.

Perhaps he should be. This idea that we should tolerate terrible things and only respond to them politely seems to produce bad outcomes, for some mysterious reason.

Any analysis of Github's functionality that begins and ends with blaming individuals and their competency is deeply mistaken while being insulting. Anyone who has ever worked at a large company knows exactly how hard it is for top performers to make changes and it's not difficult because the other people are stupid. At least in my experience, almost everyone holding this "they must be stupid" opinion knows very little about how large organizations make decisions and knows very little about how incentives at different levels of an org chart leads to suboptimal decisions and results. I would agree with you that being overly polite helps no one, but being correct does, and what they initially wrote isn't even right and it's also insulting. There's no value in that.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can always host Forgejo themselves if a service level has to be kept under control. With Github that’s not even an option. I would even consider that moving everything from one single point of failure to an other is not the brightest move.

> With Github that’s not even an option. Github does offer a self hosted product: GitHub Enterprise Server

Forgejo is GPL 3, with the Github stuff apparently even running it on owned device is tied to a per user per month bill, and I have no idea if code is available and editable just having a look at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/githubente...

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#260

Maybe this is a nice chance to ask, would you move from Gitlab to Github? I would say no, but some people in my org are proposing it, it seems to me simply because the integration it has with AI tools, but my experience has been worse in Github than with Gitlab.

We are self-hosting GitLab, which you can’t with GitHub.
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