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GitHub is sinking

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Re: GitHub is sinking

#91

Post by watwut »

aliasxneo wrote: post #13
johnfn wrote: 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 dont even like AI much and this still seem to me like yet another instance of people blaming AI for normal mismanagement and failure.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#92

Post by pelasaco »

johnfn wrote: 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…

Yes, I posted the same observation 3 months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46877226

"Yes, it (AI) will kill open source—at least as we know it. I’m convinced that GitHub and GitLab will eventually stop offering their services for free if the flood of low-quality, "vibe-coded" projects—complete with lengthy but shallow documentation—continues to grow at the current rate."

Re: GitHub is sinking

#93

Post by pelasaco »

People used GitHub's free infrastructure for over a decade without complaining. Now AI-generated spam and massive amounts of low-quality code are increasing costs everywhere, and suddenly GitHub is the bad guy for acting like a business. Criticizing centralization is fair, but pretending GitHub gave nothing to open source is just dishonest. Alternatives today, are probably going to be flooded by the low-quality AI generated code tomorrow...

Re: GitHub is sinking

#94

Post by pelasaco »

egwor wrote: post #49
tbolt wrote: 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…

try to find the issue boards.. its a mess. And expensive.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#95

Post by lbrito »

johnfn wrote: 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…

Gergely's newsletter claims its more like 2.3x.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#96

Post by IshKebab »

egwor wrote: post #49
tbolt wrote: 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…

> to approve a MR you need to click a button that is actually a menu

It's not really any better on Github. Why do I have to click on "Files changed" to approve a PR? Overall I would say it is on par with Github. Worse in some ways; better in others.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#97

Post by IshKebab »

tbolt wrote: 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!

Funny but not really true. It's not really any more bloated or confusing than Github. It's not really "enterprise grade" software. If you want that look at Jira or anything Microsoft produces.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#98

Post by 0xblinq »

johnfn wrote: 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…

A big part of the problem IS Microsoft acquisition. They forced them to move to Azure, which is terrible.

Around 8 years ago I was working for a company that they also acquired, and they also forced us to move to Azure. Performance was terrible and our system wasn’t just working there as it should. A few years later our service was dead and all customers moved to one of their office products.

Re: GitHub is sinking

#99

Post by IshKebab »

lawn wrote: post #68
coolgoose wrote: post #17

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.

How many PRs from other people have you received on your self-hosted Forgejo instance?

Re: GitHub is sinking

#100

Post by antiframe »

chilmers wrote: post #78
einsteinx2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 graph is not accurate, because GitHub's historical downtime data is not accurate. For example, here is a Hacker News story about GitHub being down on July 28th 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12178449 Here's GitHub's historical uptime graph (on which this chart is based), saying there was no recorded downtime that day, or in fact that entire month: https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime?page=40

Looks like it's not accurate by under repporting not over reporting. So their down time was likely worse!
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