GitHub is sinking • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub is sinking

#31

Post by chowells » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

ako wrote: post #25

aliasxneo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I had the exact same response after reading the post. I mean, I'm all for jumping on the Microsoft hate train, but not if it misses the elephant in the room. Let's say the _perfect_ GitHub replacement spawns tomorrow? What's preventing the same infrastructure challenges of millions of lines of AI-generated code destroying it? I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like i…

Why is centralized code hosting getting killed? I'm running an opensource project, >99% of the code is AI generated, could not do this without GitHub. Ai generated source code needs a place where AIs and people can collaborate. I'm expecting GitHub to be hugely successful, but mostly for an AI audience.

Because it's centralized. Your project pays the price for every unrelated project that's getting overloaded.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#32

Post by rvz » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

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…

Github had lots of outages even before AI was introduced.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#33

Post by senko » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

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…

The 800 pound gorilla in the room being a $3T company that also happens to be one of the largest cloud providers?

C'mon.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#34

Post by MrDrMcCoy » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

coolgoose wrote: post #17

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 ?

Codeberg, Sourcehut, or self hosted Gitea.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#35

Post by LorenDB » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #6

I have lost count of how many times something went down on GitHub ever since documenting it on this comment chain [0] and also predicting 6 years ago [1], that going all in and centralizing everything on to GitHub was really not a good idea if you need stability or to push a critical fix and your GitHub actions doesn't work. Now, are you going to finally self host or should we continue to expect another outage on Git…

Why do I keep seeing people blaming Tay.ai? That was a one-off Twitter chatbot that was shut down a decade ago.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#36

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub is sinking

#37

Post by MYEUHD » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #2

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.

If you're on the desktop, refresh the page cache by using Ctrl + Shift + R

The page will load correctly

Re: GitHub is sinking

#38

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

idiotsecant wrote: post #19

bdangubic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

of all the awful things AI is doing and will be doing to society, killing centralized code hosting and social media will be its shinniest moments, both deserve to die painful deaths

Yes, the terrible sin of ... Hosting code where people can find it

[deleted]

Re: GitHub is sinking

#39

Post by noprocrasted » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

dcrazy wrote: post #14

noprocrasted wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is just typical techbro gaslighting. There is no rate-limit and hasn't been for years (it's just default deny), but they refuse to change the wording to reflect.

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.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#40

Post by politelemon » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

hirako2000 wrote: post #20

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…

GitHub hasn't changed in any positive way since the acquisition. A decade is a long time, it tells. GitHub action, co pilot. Oh and that ugly AI search I'm unable to disable. Migration to azure. Yes Microsoft managed to ruin the network effect. Outages? The straw that broke the camel's back.

> GitHub hasn't changed in any positive way since the acquisition.

It's more like any positive actions they have had are being outright dismissed or forgotten. They removed several restrictions that Github had over private accounts, as well as github actions. Aside from the downtimes, the Github of today is fantastic compared to pre-acquisition Github.