GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#61

Post by Sytten » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

I used to believe that it was not necessary until I started building my own startup. If you dont have analytics you are flying blind. You don't know what your users actually care about and how to optimize a successful user journey. The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#62

Post by Sytten » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #59

a2128 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just anecdotally, I get the feeling telemetry often does more harm than good, because it's too easy to misinterpret or lie with statistics. There needs to be proper statistical methodology and biases need to be considered, but this doesn't always happen. Maybe a contrived example, but someone wants to show high impact on their next performance review? Implement the new feature in such a way that everyone easily miscl…

Not to mention it's really hard to statistically tell the difference between people spending a lot of time with a feature because it's really useful or because it's really difficult to get to do what you want Telemetry is a really poor substitute for actually observing a couple of your users. But it's cheap and feels scientific and inclusive/fair (after all you are looking at everyone )

That is just poor analytics IMO, if you have a good harness you can definitely tell if a feature is not well designed. You have to optimize for things like number of clicks to perform an operation not time spent in app.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#63

Post by throwaway27448 » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

Sytten wrote: post #61

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

I used to believe that it was not necessary until I started building my own startup. If you dont have analytics you are flying blind. You don't know what your users actually care about and how to optimize a successful user journey. The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

I'm pretty ok with the github cli tool team flying blind. The tool isn't exactly a necessary part of any workflow. You don't need telemetry to glean that

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#64

Post by LtWorf » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

figmert wrote: post #41

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

While I agree, I personally always opt out if I'm aware, and hate it when a tool suddenly gets telemetry, I don't think Git is comparable, same with Linux. Linux and Git are fully open source, and have big companies contribute to it. If a company like Google, Microsoft etc need a feature, they can usually afford to hire someone and develop _and_ maintain this feature. Something like gh is the opposite. It's maintaine…

Good news! gh is actually a client of a web API so they can just read their logs to know what's being used!

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#65

Post by embedding-shape » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

Sytten wrote: post #61

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

I used to believe that it was not necessary until I started building my own startup. If you dont have analytics you are flying blind. You don't know what your users actually care about and how to optimize a successful user journey. The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

You're only flying blind if you make decisions not looking and thinking. Analytics isn't the only way to figure out "what your users actually care about", you can also try the old school way, commonly referred to as "Talking with people", then after taking notes, you think about it, maybe discuss with others. Don't take what people say at face value, but think about it together with your knowledge and experience, and you'll make even better product decisions than the people who are only making "data driven decisions" all the time.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#66

Post by LtWorf » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #45

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

Git notoriously has had performance issues and did not scale and has had a horrible user interface. Both of these problems can be measured using telemetry and improvements can be measured once telemetry is in place.

How was it notorious if git has no telemetry? According to you without telemetry nothing can be known, and nothing can become notorious.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#67

Post by LtWorf » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #22

Forgeties79 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where (surprise surprise) I respect Valve. The hardware survey is opt in and transparent. They get useful info out of it and it’s just..not scummy. There are all sorts of best practices for getting info without vacuuming up everyone’s data in opaque ways.

To be fair, you can be pretty sure they're heavily leveraging all their store data, in loads of ways. They probably sit on the biggest dataset of video game preferences for people in general, and I'm betting they make use of it heavily.

And you think microsoft isn't already doing that?

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#68

Post by pixel_popping » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

ImJasonH wrote: post #27

Do people think that GitHub isn't already collecting and aggregating all the requests sent to their servers, which is after all the entire point of the gh CLI? If you don't want your requests tracked, you're going to have to opt out of a lot more than this one setting.

Data is on their server, so obviously they are already doing it, they just want to increase tracking by knowing what transit as well to Gitlab, Codeberg and such by having additional client-side metrics.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#69

Post by throwaway27448 » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:56 PM UTC

dale_glass wrote: post #48

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? No, because users have different needs and thoughts from the developers. And because sometimes it's hard to get good feedback from people. Maybe everyone loves the concept of feature X, but then never uses it in practice for some reason. Or a given feature has…

> because git famously has a terrible UI

Thankfully, github has zero control over git. If they did have control they would have sank the whole operation on year one

> because somebody would have looked at the stats and for instance have added "git restore" right from the very start, because "git checkout -- foo.txt" is an absolutely unintuitive command.

How is git restore any better? Restoring what from when? At least git checkout is clear in what it does.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#70

Post by binaryturtle » Wed, Apr 22, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

traceroute66 wrote: post #24

I suggest anyone who cares, and certainly anybody in the EU mails privacy@github.com and also opens a support ticket to let them know exactly what you think

Wouldn't telemetry solve this problem automatically? I mean: they should get some signal back when people opt-out no? :)