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GitHub is sinking

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Re: GitHub is sinking

#51

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

How did people do it before github? Did everyone write everything with peek and poke?

Re: GitHub is sinking

#52
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…

If that's the case, we should also see the exact same pattern on Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. Do we?

Re: GitHub is sinking

#54
post #52
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…

If that's the case, we should also see the exact same pattern on Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. Do we?

What is easier to 10x? A tent or a flat?

Re: GitHub is sinking

#55
post #49
post #3

“GitLab - enterprise grade, meaning it’s bloated and confusing but it’ll impress your boss. This could be the choice if you need multiple meetings to make the choice.“ lol!

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…

[dead]

Re: GitHub is sinking

#56
post #52
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…

If that's the case, we should also see the exact same pattern on Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. Do we?

10x of nothing is nothing.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#58
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm sure the underlying infra is not a single server, so this is mostly a period where they have to adapt to higher loads due to AI becoming actually useable in the last 8 months. 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.

> 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 Microsoft brings in from GitHub then there is certainly no guarantee they will bother to solve these issues adequately.

And I'd be shocked if the revenue side of things isn't lagging way behind the extra usage post-AI-era, both because a lot of the new use is probably on the GitHub free tier, and because even on the paid tier most usage (other than CI/Actions, AFAIK) are on a fixed subscription cost per user regardless of how much you are slamming their servers and it is unclear how much they can raise that price without current enterprise users fleeing.

Twitter had a clearer goal that aligned with the financials... support more people stably, show more ads. Things are less clear with GitHub's business model where the free tier is a loss leader for the paid tier but the expansion in usage is likely to balloon the free tier usage at a far faster rate than the paid tier usage.

Also (and this part is admittedly far more speculative) if AI labs are to be believed this is still early days for AI usage and we'll still see massive usage growth over the next few years. If GitHub is already having existential trouble at the beginning of the curve, what hope do they have to scale up with their current business model if AI usage actually does ramp up exponentially?

Re: GitHub is sinking

#59
post #52
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…

If that's the case, we should also see the exact same pattern on Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. Do we?

GitHub has been basically the default for free public git hosting for a long time. I was curious what bitbucket has and it looks like the free tier is so limited, I can't imagine a lot of people hosting vibe coded open source there.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#60
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How did people do it before github? Did everyone write everything with peek and poke?

Private people would keep their code locally and share the snapshot of the code using any file sharing or hosting option available.

Companies had been hosting their own CVS or later svn servers.

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