Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ghostty is leaving GitHub

mitchellh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 1001 posts

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#551

Post by mh- »

idan wrote: post #96
mitchellh wrote: post #26

I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say). Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know. We've been…

Hi there! Longtime fan and hubber here. It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there's ~180m GH accounts nowadays) My version of your post reads differently: "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" Walking away would be easy. I felt that way when I left Heroku ~six years ago. I left that jo…

I appreciate that you're staying inside with that mentality.

Like Mitchell, GitHub was once a dream job for me, and it just never lined up pre-acquisition. I shared many of Mitchell's habits too, about GitHub being my reading material. Until some time after passing 2000 starred repos, I had literally read every line of code in each of them. GitHub still feels like home to me, as a user.

Good luck, and we're all counting on you.

(359439, which is quite high for this thread, it seems!)

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#552

Post by ergocoder »

celestialcheese wrote: post #6
arn3n wrote: post #3

What do we think is more to blame for GitHub's massive decrease in quality? I've heard the following theories: 1. Increasing amount of AI-generated code in their codebase, decreasing the quality of the service. 2. Bought by Microsoft, and their bad engineering culture has spread to GitHub. Perhaps it's a bit of both.

Azure migration is the most plausible explanation I've heard. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173

OMG I was a few FAANG-like companies. Most acquisitions failed due to the migration. It always played in the same way:

1. The acquired company was small company to the acquirer. 2. We need to improve scalability and reduce cost!

Then, they migrated. The new system was worse and didn't have parity. It was years. Customers were moving off. The project/product shut down.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#553

Post by whalesalad »

colechristensen wrote: post #528
whalesalad wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a rails app from the early 10’s era think heroku dominance. therefore to run it you’ll need a dozen sidecars for things like redis or elasticsearch and others. it has all the fun ergonomics and bloated memory consumption of that stack as well. the all-in-one go based tools are probably better for a solo homelab style deployment (gitea etc)

Eh, it wasn't about the stack, it was the features over quality track they were taking for a few years there where what features they had were impressive (they really motivated GitHub to get off its butt and do some things) but there were plenty of experience and reliability problems.

I just mean running it yourself comes with that heavy stack caveat. As far as a platform goes, it's a pretty comprehensive system.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#554

Post by deaux »

Rapzid wrote: post #541
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #59

I'm not sure how we ever could have expected GitHub to continue with or add quality when being built by the same company that also builds MS Teams. There are clearly the wrong quality levers at work inside Microsoft. Yes, it seemed like Microsoft had a brief interregnum period of about 10 years where they seemed to have a renaissance and a genuine culture change and a concern for quality and initiative seemed to take…

Teams has introduced substantial improvements over the past couple years..

Ah yes, after a decade of being one of the worst pieces of software with 10M+ MAU, literally only gaining market share because of monopolistic bundling practices.

So bad that if a startup had made Microsoft Teams they would've gone out of business after a year.

But the substantial improvements!!!

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#555

Post by ianpenney »

mitchellh wrote: post #26

I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say). Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know. We've been…

I don’t know if you remember but we met at cfgmgmtcamp in 2016.

https://imgur.com/a/auPVRuq

We weren’t even in the same circles and this was my first good conference, but my own little company that I worked at was full of motivated hackers that were trying to wrap our heads around what you already understood.

You took my comments about on-boarding and documentation very humbly and you knew what I was really saying was: keep it up.

You sure did keep it up.

Those same team mates are here with me using TF at a different company years later, and we’re still pushing left.

Those colleagues just said “it’s art and science”

… and when the art gets ripped away from you, what you described is a natural reaction.

Still, keep it up.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#556

Post by dewey »

GitHub needs a Sonos moment, after they launched their failed new app that made everyone angry and leave they got a new person in and I've seen them actively respond to issues on BlueSky with honest responses and not corporate fluff ever since while also turning the ship around.

https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/07/sonos-officially-appoin...

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#557

Post by jarjoura »

bsimpson wrote: post #231
_doctor_love wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> insider perspective on this I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters. Everything becomes the numbers game. Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, CA (where software goes to die), Salesforce, the list goes on.…

I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community. As so often happens, that didn't last long. Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand. I'm sure there are countless…

GitHub had no reason to sell to Microsoft, they could have remained the bootstrapped company they started as, and rode the SaaS boom, since they were profitable on day 1. Seems a bit unfair to blame Microsoft though, because it was the founders who decided they wanted that sweet VC funding and Andreessen was happy to pay out.

Not sure if it mattered after that but they had that weird Tom Preston-Werner scandal that got him fired. Since he was the CTO, I kind of suspect that sent them on a collision course with needing to exit the VC round and Microsoft paid out.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#558

Post by pocksuppet »

koolala wrote: post #318
jenadine wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far everything is going according to the plan. Humans are really close to make the AI that will replace them and enter into the next phase of the plan. Or do you have a better idea of what the plan exactly is?

You mean the AI that might fail and suck every last ounce of entropy or life out the planet and sufficate it? Have you seen the insane amount of natural gas being burned to power it? Obviously I'd love if AI solved its own energy crisis but that hasn't even begun to happen yet. You think it will invent cold fusion? Room temp super conductors? Solar cells past our theoretical limits? Do you realize it's literally bein…

It's not going to do any of these things, because it's auto-complete.

No, it won't bypass P≠NP either.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#559

Post by pocksuppet »

noir_lord wrote: post #58
mitchellh wrote: post #26

I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say). Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know. We've been…

There isn't inherently wrong with loving a tool or been sad when it it becomes something you can't love anymore, we are tool using monkeys after all - it is perhaps our defining characteristic. I'd be absolute crushed if Linux (for example) morphed into something I could not/no longer wanted to use, part of the reason I use open source wherever I can is because that is less likely to happen, Inkscape is still inkscap…

Gnome. If you liked Gnome 2, by now you're crushed. At least you can use Mate Desktop.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#560

Post by pocksuppet »

BizarroLand wrote: post #160
frevib wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enshittification has become the winning strategy for companies. If you don’t enshittify you will lose.

This is my darkly optimistic take on enshittification: Companies know how to make good product, but if they don't have "new and shiny" to impress us anymore, then their only alternative is to make things worse so they can heel turn and then make things "better" by unmaking all of the worse things they did. They can also milk their customers coming and going in the process. It's not "enshittify or lose", its just raw…

I don't think companies know how to make a good product any more. Conway's law won this battle.

I think it's that company management has no incentive to do well. So they have no reason to push this down to the bottom tier of workers who actually make the products. The feedback loop is open. They make an order, the product gets worse, the line goes up, they don't know the product got worse and they have no reason to care anyway.

Slop didn't start with AI.

The West already forgot how to manufacture things, and we are now forgetting how to code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907879

Post reply on HN