Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to think people who said Github had become very unreliable were exagerating, but I can't miss it now. If you want to keep people, you have to actually go down less. It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)
Salesforce never understood Heroku. Salesforce's understanding of Heroku, if such an understanding ever existed, was wildly different than what Heroku understood it wanted to be. Benioff's penchant for buying himself a company every year did not help — "no headcount this year, we're buying Mulesoft/Quip/Tableau/Slack/$WHATEVER. And oops we spent too much money on dreamforce. Sucks that your pager rotations are burnin…
Isn't this the massive problem? You're trying to do everything, and you can't, and you're trying to do it for everyone all at once, and have tied it all together so much that scaling up gets worse. If it's more than twice as hard to cope with twice the use, then you have to charge a bunch more to customers as you grow - and that's for your customers to get no actual benefit.
> GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster.
The experience has degraded. It's really, really bad. I've seen companies spending thousands and thousands of dollars weekly in developer time *hitting rerun on broken actions*. It's so expensive to start with then so expensive in how awful it is to use.
Something I really don't get I guess is what out of all of this actually needs to be cross-project. How much of my github use needs access to something that isn't running on the same machine? I worked with a team building things actively, maybe 20 devs? That's not really a large set of users. Let's say 10 devs with the workload of 20, the cheapest plan would be $40/mo, enterprise would be ~$200. Would ten heavy users really max out a 64GB ram, 6+8 core new i5 with dual nvme drives, a gigabit connection and unlimited traffic? That's about $40 at hetzner for a box.
I'm not arguing a big federated position, I just don't really get why some of these enormous companies need to be so centralised. It feels like the problem is trying to be a big interlinked thing, and failing at it. The only things I can think of are
1. Links between issues
2. Accounts
3. Search
The first is mostly solved with literally just links, accounts isn't a huge problem and search is fair enough - but search is utterly awful and I cannot find things within one single repo or organisation reliably. So global stuff is irrelevant.
> And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up
If github persists in being utterly shit for developers, it won't be around to find out. I'm not sure at all what part of the AI stuff needs to make everything else bad, and I'm extremely bullish on AI and agentic coding.
To really hammer this last point home, as agentic coding means we can do a lot more and faster - the unreliability of github has become much more apparent and impactful. Unreliable tests, unreliable code pulling and pushing, unreliable diffs. You're making the agents jobs harder, making the devs jobs harder exactly in the place they now spend much more time.
It makes github dramatically more expensive as a place to work. Also just really fucking annoying.