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GitHub is sinking

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61–70 of 176 posts

Re: GitHub is sinking

#61
Related:

Ghostty is leaving GitHub

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579

Before GitHub

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940921

Days without GitHub incidents

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48012022

GitHub Actions is the weakest link

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47933257

GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47923357

Re: GitHub is sinking

#62
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 graph in TFA shows the downtime pattern starting in January 2020. OpenAI released GPT-3.5 in November 2022 (basically December), and LLM/agentic coding didn’t really kick off in the way you’re describing until 2024, but really in 2025.

How can that explain the terrible uptime for the ~4 years post acquisition before all the AI stuff you’re talking about started?

Re: GitHub is sinking

#63
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…

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…

> I mean, I'm all for jumping on the Microsoft hate train, but not if it misses the elephant in the room.

That elephant didn’t even exist yet for the first few years of poor uptime shown in the graph in TFA… I don’t really disagree if we’re talking about the recent uptime issues, but how does that explain the years 2020-2023?

Re: GitHub is sinking

#64
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 graph in TFA shows the downtime pattern starting in January 2020. OpenAI released GPT-3.5 in November 2022 (basically December), and LLM/agentic coding didn’t really kick off in the way you’re describing until 2024, but really in 2025. How can that explain the terrible uptime for the ~4 years post acquisition before all the AI stuff you’re talking about started?

The subjective experience I and others report is that GitHub feels to have gotten significantly worse over the last few months. If you look at the month over month view of "Uptime history" in the cited link[1], it confirms this: it's been sub-90 (even sub-80 last month) essentially since the start of this year (i.e. when GitHub says that commit activity 10xed). Go back even a year and it's all in the high 9s.

I honestly can't explain the discrepancy between the graph in the article and the month over month stats on the same page, but the latter tracks both to my own subjective experience of GitHub and their own internal metrics.

[1]: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

Re: GitHub is sinking

#65
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…

We want to thank you for your heroic service in our defense, sir. We really need people like you who know in what side they're at.

Microsoft investors

Re: GitHub is sinking

#66

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…

> I mean, I'm all for jumping on the Microsoft hate train, but not if it misses the elephant in the room. That elephant didn’t even exist yet for the first few years of poor uptime shown in the graph in TFA… I don’t really disagree if we’re talking about the recent uptime issues, but how does that explain the years 2020-2023?

It doesn't. It just means if they were having problems before, they've now been made significantly worse by AI (on the free tier). All I'm saying is that the problem is bigger than, "Microsoft sucks."

Re: GitHub is sinking

#68

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 ?

I've been running a self-hosted Forgejo. Extremely responsive and I've been really happy with it.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#69
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 graph in TFA shows the downtime pattern starting in January 2020. OpenAI released GPT-3.5 in November 2022 (basically December), and LLM/agentic coding didn’t really kick off in the way you’re describing until 2024, but really in 2025. How can that explain the terrible uptime for the ~4 years post acquisition before all the AI stuff you’re talking about started?

I think it's just a case of brain drain, followed by reckless AI adoption which both drove the quality down.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#70
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…

I like to think that Microsoft is trying to run GitHub in Windows in their Azure cloud. And on the fact that every time GitHub is down I think of "someone updated the Windows Servers GH runs on and had to reboot everything".

While I'm 99% sure it is not true, it makes me sleep better at night. And giggle a little when it goes down.

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