Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by throwawaymaths » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:49 PM UTC

csoups14 wrote: post #258

antonvs wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 littl…

IDK being able to produce a good product in a corpo environment sure sounds like a competency issue.

> how hard it is for top performers to make change

then you're not a top performer anymore?

seems pretty straightforward

> they must be stupid

one can be not stupid and still not competent

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

#272

Post by tryauuum » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

cinntaile wrote: post #212

whatevaa wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus famously was quite strict and cursed quite a bit when somebody pissed him off with stupidity.

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

GitHub can suck my ass, I think this is the most suitable feedback to them

I've spent more than a month trying to delete my account on GitHub, still couldn't do it

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

#273

Post by Yizahi » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:51 PM UTC

dannersy wrote: post #201

styanax wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the previous HN article, I recall many a comment talking about how they should change this, leave the politics/negative juju out because it was a bad look for the Zig community. It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits. I commend them for their actions in doing what's best for the community at the cost of some personal me…

I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting their failures and changing their mind. For some reason I see the opposite: people respecting those who "stick to their guns" or double down when something is clearly wrong. As you say, the context matters and these edits seem to be learning from the feedback rather than saving face since the sentiment stands, just in a less needlessly targeted way.

Well, it's not like it's a simple black and white situation, universally applicable to every debate in human history. Sometimes it is relatively better to be open-minded and able to change own opinion. Sometimes it is relatively better to keep pushing a point if it is rational and/or morally correct.

The reason why the latter stance is often popularized and cheered is because it is often harder to do, especially in the adverse conditions, when not changing your opinion has a direct cost of money or time or sanity or in rare cases even freedom. Usually it involves small human group or individual against a faceless corporation, making it even harder. Of course we should respect people standing against corporation.

PS: this is not applicable if they are "clearly wrong" of course.

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

#274

Post by IgorPartola » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:53 PM UTC

galangalalgol wrote: post #249

rikroots wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality, and like it or not are now part of modern software engineering. I hate that this is perceived as generally true. Stars can be farmed and gamed; and the value of a star does not decay over time. Issues can be automatically closed, or answere…

Stars, issues closed, PRs, commits, all are pointless metrics. The metrics you want are mostly ones they don't and can't have. Number of dependent projects for instance. The metrics they keep are just what people have said, a way to gameify and keep people interested.

So number of daily/weekly downloads on PyPI/npm/etc?

All these things are a proxy for popularity and that is a valuable metric. I have seen projects with amazing code quality but if they are not maintained eventually they stop working due to updates to dependencies, external APIs, runtime environment, etc. And I have see projects with meh code quality but so popular that every quirk and weird issue had a known workaround. Take ffmpeg for example: its code is.. arcane. But would you choose a random video transcoder written in JavaScript just due to the beautiful code that was last updated in 2012?

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

#275

Post by davidee » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:54 PM UTC

miningape wrote: post #200

coopykins wrote: post #169

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.

For me they're both about equally shitty, but with Github you get a nice commit calendar to show off to recruiters - so Github wins IMO.

I believe the exact same exists in Gitlab under each user profile.

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

#276

Post by kragen » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:55 PM UTC

styanax wrote: post #145

brushfoot wrote: post #139

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…

On the previous HN article, I recall many a comment talking about how they should change this, leave the politics/negative juju out because it was a bad look for the Zig community. It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits. I commend them for their actions in doing what's best for the community at the cost of some personal me…

As I see it, someone who "listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride" would include a note at the end of the post about the edits. Admitting you were wrong requires not erasing the evidence of what you said.

(He did post a kind of vague apology in https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p..., but it's ambiguous enough that anyone who was offended is free to read it as either retracting the offending accusation, or not. This is plausibly the best available alternative for survival in the current social-media landscape, because it's at best useless to apologize to a mob that's performatively offended on behalf of people they don't personally know, and usually counterproductive because it marks you as a vulnerable victim, but the best available alternative might still tend to weaken the kind of integrity we're talking about rather than strengthen it.)

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

#277

Post by dlisboa » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:55 PM UTC

bramhaag wrote: post #229

dlisboa wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://status.codeberg.eu/status/codeberg Their reliability is not great unfortunately. Currently their 24h uptime is 89% for the main site. They are partially degraded right now. The 14 day uptime is 98% but I think that’s actually because some of their auxiliary systems have great uptime, the main site is never that great it seems.

This isn't a great time for them: https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg/115652289949965925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131693

Yeah, they were down last week too. It's hard to run an open git forge on a small volunteer team, the workload is read and write heavy with endless "customers" (or bots).

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

#278

Post by naikrovek » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 1:55 PM UTC

psychoslave wrote: post #259

NoahZuniga wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

yes, GitHub Enterprise Server is not free. And yes you pay a license fee per user per month, billed annually, and the minimum license purchase is 10 users at something like $21/user/month. Microsoft discounts you qualify for will bring that down. You pay because you get support. You won't need it often, but when you do, you really need it.

It is easy to administer even for 15k users, and mostly it takes care of itself if you give it enough RAM and CPU for all the activity.

Downloading the virtual hard drive image from GitHub is easy and decrypting the code inside is borderline trivial, but I'm not going to help anyone do that. I've never had a need to do it.

As a server product it is good. I recommend it if you can afford it. It is not intended for private individuals or non-profits, though. It's for corporations who want their code on-premise, and for that it is quite good.

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

#279

Post by nottorp » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

csoups14 wrote: post #258

antonvs wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 littl…

But should you care about MS's internals?

Product is useless, you move along. Save your compassion for those actually needing it.

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

#280

Post by ants_everywhere » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 2:03 PM UTC

zero0529 wrote: post #265

ants_everywhere wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coul…

I agree partially. I do think that it was weird to focus on the AI aspect so much. AI is going to pollute everything going forward whether you like it or not. And honestly who cares, either it is a good ressource for learning or it’s not. You have to decide that for yourself and not based on whether AI helped writing it. However I think some of the critique was because he stole the code for the interactive editor and…

You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual claim was that Zigbook had not complied with the MIT license's attribution clause for code someone believed was copied. MIT only requires attribution for copies of "substantial portions" of code, and the code copied was 22 lines.

Does that count as substantial? I'm not sure because I'm not a lawyer, but this was really an issue about definitions in an attribution clause over less code than people regularly copy from stack overflow without a second thought. By the time this accusation was made, the Zigbook author was already under attack from the community which put them in a defensive posture.

Now, just to be clear, I think the book author behaved poorly in response. But the internet is full of young software engineers who would behave poorly if they wrote a book for a community and the community turned around and vilified them for it. I try not to judge individuals by the way they behave on their worst days. But I do think something like a community has a behavior and culture of its own and that does need to be guided with intention.