[DrammBA]

I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it

This quote from the post resonated with me:

> I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.

The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on?

[realo]

Microsoft, Greed, Outsourcing to low-cost-countries who couldn't care less and rotate entire dev teams on you every few months or so, etc...

No AI needed at all. Only humans.

[osigurdson]

I suspect it isn't even really "greed". It is just the slow mold growth of an org chart optimizing comfort for itself instead of value for customers. Generally, startups / founders are the only anti-bodies against this type of behavior.

[bavell]

What a weird time for our industry. On one hand, small teams have never been able to move faster than right now.

On the other, the economy and market conditions are brutal for the little guys. Incumbent behemoths hoovering up value, talent and financing.

Instead of shaking things up as usual when a major paradigm shift hits, AI has mostly been a centralizing, consolidating force. Not that I was expecting it to be otherwise, but it's certainly dismaying to witness.

Or am I being too pessimistic / glorifying the past?

[pocksuppet]

This is not just the tech industry.

It's easier than ever to make your own furniture. IKEA is bigger than ever.

It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever.

It's easier than ever to 3D-print tractor parts. John Deere is bigger than ever.

It's easier than ever to switch to solar power. The petroleum industry is bigger than ever.

One person reverse-engineered Coca Cola, made an exact taste-alike and published the formula. You can make some at home. Coca Cola is bigger than ever.

Something fundamental is wrong with the economy.

[AuthAuth]

The hidden cost to competing in these industries is insane. Its so hard to build a physical product that can compete against a giant like IKEA. You need to make some with less r&d, less automation, less infrastructure and you're going to sell less units and all that needs to be price competitive against something that is made on an production line with a team of experienced engineers and sold to millions at fine margins.

[pjc50]

> It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever.

In this case: these statements aren't contradictory, they're complementary. It's easy to publish a game on Steam, where the audience are and the money is. It's also easy to publish on itch.io where no money is.

[pocksuppet]

It's not "you publish a game on Steam" - it's "Steam publishes a game that you made." But it's easier than ever to publish it yourself too.

[hvb2]

> Something fundamental is wrong with the economy.

Economies of scale make it so that your home made furniture will still be more expensive than ikea. Same for the Coca Cola example.

For tractor parts, you would still need to make sure they don't break and work within small tolerances.

[pocksuppet]

That depends, doesn't it? If I make it, it costs time instead of money. (Costs of tools are amortized over all the things I might make.) If I get it from IKEA, it costs money instead of time.

[a1o]

I think org chart the impact is how the individual person can advance their career while doing good work. If they only get rewarded for new things, service and maintenance suffers.

[davedx]

It most certainly is also greed. Stockholders want returns. One way to do that is maximize profits at all costs. Greed.

[osigurdson]

How does low quality translate to shareholder returns?

[mcepl]

By lowering cost and not investing profit to the company? Yes, short-term v long-term, but who in this world cares about anything after their next salary?

[tardedmeme]

Shareholder returns translate to low quality because money is never reinvested in the business. Everything is cut to the bone.

[Yajirobe]

What should we do? The only thing I can think of is to stay vocal about it. Never accept enshittification. Always point things out when they suck.

[airstrike]

Not selling out, basically. Easier said than done.

[tardedmeme]

If you have the choice to sell out or not sell out, the only logical decision is to sell out, because then you'll have lots of money and one presumes the product wasn't emotionally important to you. You can then move on to making your next product.

[airstrike]

Couldn't have said it better. Whatever else you want to build in life will be exponentially easier if you sell out first, and many builders have many things they want to build and not just one.

[nicr_22]

Focus on open protocols, simple formats over complex vendor-specific cruft. Then you can always "fork" away from an enshittified saas.

I bet a small team of the quality of the kind developers who are attracted to hacking on Ghostty could recreate the subset of GitHub functionality they actually need in ~six months. It's just the problem of how to pay for the ongoing care, maintenance and hosting? Maybe another opportunity for Mitchell's particular brand of philanthropic OSS.

[twelvedogs]

https://forgejo.org/ already exists, I suspect the issue would be hosting it at scale

[bombcar]

DNS is the cause of all problems, but it's also the solution - just like anyone can run Apache or Nginx, so should anyone be able to run a git setup. Then it scales really well, as everyone is doing their own thing on their own domains.

Of course, you lose out on some things like ease of user access and various protections.

[tardedmeme]

Anyone can run a git setup. You need git and SSH installed on a server and you need an SSH key for each user.

[rvz]

The harsh reality, but now it is humans using AI agents which is why we cannot have nice things.

[munificent]

> it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays.

Not just the web either. It feels like the whole world is in a race to throw shit together and cash out as quickly as possible: influencers, hustle culture, enshittification, etc.

My pet theory is that all of the global chaos around the climate, politics, pandemic, etc. is leading people to no longer believe in the future. Once you lose that, all that's left to care about is the right now. No one takes the time to scrimshaw the deckrails on a ship they believe is sinking.

[bombcar]

   And you, my father, there on the sad height,
   Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
   Do not go gentle into that good night.
   Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

We can't really change the tide lest we be King Cnut - but we can at least take the time and effort in the things we do to fight against entropy - bring more order and durability into our lives.

Or perhaps another adaptation:

   God, grant me the serenity
   to accept the enshittification I cannot change
   the courage to improve the things I can
   and the wisdom to know the difference.

[mmooss]

We can; the tide changed to where it is now and can change again - and somebody will change it.

People need to stop bemoaning it, and think and do something. The enshittification is an idiotic, failing, extremely short-sighted strategy.

It's a huge opportunity - your competition has stopped investing in its product, fired its talent, treats its customers with utter contempt, and is managed by imbeciles. Who is a better target for disruption? Hire the talent, market your quality, treat your customers with respect, point out the BS your competition does every time they do it. Stop staring at your navel.

[bombcar]

That's the whole point - it's too easy to sit around on HN and bitch about enshittification - which just is enshittification!

We each have to work on our areas of quality - and when everyone starts doing that, the world changes.

[gosub100]

One way it's possible is if the US ditches the two party system. We are starting to see some cracks in the partition recently with the Epstein files and the Israeli genocide. People from both sides are starting to realize they share a lot of common ground.

[throwthrowuknow]

That isn’t it. If you think bad weather and a flu is something to be scared of, try imagining what several thousand hydrogen bombs would do.

[probably_wrong]

Leaving aside the reductionism, the difference is that we are already seeing the effects of the "bad weather" and we all lived through [1] (and, to a point, are still feeling the effects of) the "flu". No "ifs" about it.

There's no need to worry about a threat that has been theorized for 70 years (and may very well never happen) when there are actual, real catastrophes happening right now.

[1] Well, except for those who didn't make it through. They are not here by definition, but their memory is still fresh.

[palata]

> I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it

I think the "ridiculously dramatic" part is the whole love letter to GitHub, not the frustration.

And I think it is fair to say that it is ridiculously dramatic. Which is okay, of course, I'm not criticising here. Just like it would feel ridiculously dramatic (at least to me) if someone explained that they cried today when they stopped their subscription to Netflix in order to move to another service, because they love Netflix so much.

[nicr_22]

The difference here is _creative_ work vs consumption. Craftspeople like Mitchell feel passionately about the tools they rely on to build. Github has also been a social place for builders.

I don't think it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about great tools rusting or makerspaces closing...

[palata]

Again, I am not criticising the feeling. It's okay to feel the way we feel.

I am just saying that when Mitchell mentioned it being "ridiculously dramatic", I think he was not talking about the frustration but rather about the fact that he cried about leaving GitHub.

It's okay to feel sad about something and to also feel that it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about it.

Thanks for the downvotes though.

[psychoslave]

>The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on?

Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era? Segfault everywhere, "fatal error was successful", kernel panic, BSOD, screen freeze for any reason and its opposite.

Nothing serves better good all time than bad memory as they say.

Not that the gigabit of useless crap to show essentially a few ko of text is fine, but the abuses and horrors that humans commit just shifted a bit where they land, it's not like there was a time were we had a land free of human dirty stuffs.

[DrammBA]

> Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era?

I take it you're agreeing with the sentiment since you had to go back 40-50 years to make your point.

[psychoslave]

Yes somehow, in a the sense that there are always things that we can observe as annoying when the representation of a situation where these issues are not present is easy to fantasize. But making actually disappear these annoyances is the hard part, plus the new situation have great chances to be bound to different annoyances that phantasms didn't anticipate. So the NP hard problem is being critique of our anticipations to try to avoid paths to bigger troubles, and keep steady effort on waking the path all while also paying attention to current sensory feedbacks of the situation on the road.

[Induane]

Way overcomplicating design is one challenge that keeps getting worse.

Another gigantic unspoken issue is that people have started building tons of stuff with React on purpose for some reason.

[MatthiasPortzel]

React gets blamed for this because the error handling is bad and the UX is confusing. But the issue with GitHub’s frontend is that the backend is dropping requests. When you click a button on GitHub and the loader gets stuck that’s because there no timeout/error handling in the JavaScript but there also no reply from the server. I feel like React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.

[regularfry]

> React gets blamed for this because the error handling is bad and the UX is confusing

Yes, it does.

> React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.

Two things can be bad! Except that in this case one of them is unnecessarily bad, because nobody forced them to use a front end system which defaults to terrible failure handling.

[pc86]

It's also not tautological that React apps have bad error handling. You can do proper error handling and retry logic in React, and I can't for the life of me understand why GitHub engineers making several hundred thousand a year in cash and at least that much in stock simply... don't?

It's no wonder my jobs feed is flooded with senior engineering positions at GitHub (one wonders if they're growing, or jettisoning dead weight) but I can't imagine it's a good look for the resume to put GitHub on it at this point.

[mcepl]

These are the super-engineers who created https://youtu.be/E3_95BZYIVs

[rmunn]

Oh man, I'd actually forgotten about that!

What's hilarious about that script is that the solution is so simple: use a less-than comparison instead of an equals. That's really, really all it would have taken to fix the issue. And yet https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/3157 was opened on 2024-02-17 and was merged on 2025-08-21, a full 18 months (plus a few days) later! It took literally 18 months for them to merge a bugfix that is trivially obvious to see is correct.

Yeah, the problems at GitHub ran (and still run) deep.

P.S. Yes, there are busy-wait issues in that code, which should have been addressed by bringing back the check for the `sleep` command and using it if available, falling back on the CPU-burning busy-wait only if `sleep` was unavailable. But the most revealing thing is the 18 months to merge a trivial-to-verify PR. That, more than the bad busy-wait loop, is the fundamental indicator of brokenness at GitHub under Microsoft's ownership.

[DangitBobby]

I'm so tired of this take that I've decided to create and publish a new React app every time I see it on HN.

[pc86]

This is surprising to me, I would have bet money that all the people who actively engage in this type of language/framework war discourse were all drawing Social Security by now.

[12_throw_away]

There's a big difference between a war between two somewhat equivalent things that make different choices (editor wars, language wars, etc.) vs pointing out that certain things are really fundamentally ... not good. IMO we all need to be much louder and clearer about how bad things are, and how much better they could be.

This is, in fact, on topic: github actions seemed to me like a bad idea from the start, to me, but I let my co-workers and "network effects" convince me that I was being grumpy and that it was fine, and so we've adopted it. And now ... here we are. It was exactly as bad I thought it was, and it reflected a broken engineering culture.

[DangitBobby]

That's what I've been saying this whole time! My hatred of Vim isn't a preference, vim is just fundamentally "not good"! Finally an intellectual.

[pc86]

It is certainly possible that you are brilliant and your co-workers and the industry writ large are all morons. That you were right all along, and chickens roosting and all that, though it seems at least equally as likely that this is not the case.

[12_throw_away]

If you think it requires "brilliance" to figure out that Github Actions is really bad, and/or that "the industry writ large" always makes good decisions, you might be the problem!

[OtomotO]

(Needless) complexity is going on.

KISS and you sleep better.

That and the problem of forever chasing trends and never saying: "It's done" without reinventing everything every couple of years (trends again)

Sounds too easy? It is of course simplified, but the core still holds true.

GitHub just worked, but they had to migrate to React because "that's what everyone else uses"... Pure Enshittification.

[stabbles]

After yesterday's outage they admitted that their elasticsearch index for issues/prs lost data.

They seem to have changed the primary source of data in the issues and pull requests tabs (w/o filters applied) from the underlying database to the elasticsearch search index, which has the side effect that there's a noticeable delay between state change of an issue/pr and an update in the UI. But as seen today, these can get out of sync, and apparently they even had data loss in the index.

I would really like to know their reasoning for making that change. I can totally imagine that they wanted to "simplify" so the UI uses only a single data source instead of two.

As a user it's incredibly annoying to have a delay between issue/pr state changes and the search index picking it up.

[jrochkind1]

Yeah, I have been noticing weird things with Issues and PRs, including outdated state, for months now.

When the outage happened yesterday I sort of figured it was something I had been noticing building up or something.

[SoKamil]

What? React has nothing to do with current state of affairs. In fact, React on GitHub currently exists in mere islands, i.e. in Projects and recently in Pull Requests. Most of the frontend is still Web Components[1] paired with Turbo[2] for hot reloading. GitHub is still as slow even with JavaScript disabled, try it yourself. Backend just serves stuff really slow. In fact, there is an alternative GitHub frontend (no affiliation) that feels snappier and is written in React.[3]

With that said, Mitchell complains about outages. These started directly after Microsoft acquisition[4] and are attributed to migration from AWS to Azure.

[1] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/ho...

[2] see html source for tags

[3] https://my.githero.app/

[4] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

[jrochkind1]

Pull Requests is the thing that was wacky in the UI yesterday, coincidence or not? I have no idea.

Yesterday we saw PR pages that displayed no error, just displayed wrong info. I would have preferred to get an error page than outdated or empty lists. I was guessing this was related to the React migration but I don't really know.

[queenkjuul]

I think the backend is just fucked. I have issues with Actions and the API all the time, not just the web UI

[hylaride]

Also, the browser back and forward buttons no longer work in pull requests when going between PR tabs (commits, checks, files changed, etc) as well as some other site interactions.

Like, what user-hostile intention was the reasoning behind that? I am literally imagining a product manager smoking a cigar and laughing at the RUM session replays of me losing my shit.

[frevib]

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

[marcyb5st]

Fully agree. We really should punish companies that blatantly push this kind of mercenarism. I mean, every VP and CxO join a company, he/she takes super short-sighted decisions that push some random metric a bit up, and then they leave with a huge performance bonus not caring if everything is worse. They won't be around to cope with the fallout as they are already in another company doing the same.

I am not again performance bonuses, but they should be attach to better metrics. Eg the number of happy users is still up in 3 years time. Or something like this.

[butterlesstoast]

GitHub didn't have a CTO until 2017. Vlad Federov only started in 2024.

[BizarroLand]

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 greed. Things will get better again, either that or a competitor will destroy them. Enshittification is just the current meta and a new one will come soon enough.

[pocksuppet]

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

[pc86]

When is the "get better" step? I've only ever seen two things happen mid- or post-enshittification:

    1. The company builds a moat and just remains shit.
    2. New entrants either displace the company entirely (most likely) or competition slows the enshittification process (distant second) or reverses it (almost never).

It's not clear to me why "get shitty" is a necessary step to this. What part of GitHub's executives' grand plan is "have a barely-functional service that randomly prevents people from working"?

[frevib]

> What part of GitHub's executives' grand plan is "have a barely-functional service

What about lock-in, being a monopoly? Why wouldn’t you maximize on saving costs? Sure some people leave, but the majority is not going anywhere. And if the platform dies they’ve made more money than to keep it alive.

[BizarroLand]

The enshittification process milks the current product of all of the money that can be wrung from it by any means just shy of immolation.

Companies aren't getting cheap loans right now so they're desperate to juice their stocks so that upper management can secure their bonuses.

That's why "get shitty" is necessary.

When they've wrung it dry, pocketed all of the crumbs of raw cash they can get, then they'll either collapse due to overmilking their products or they'll realize that the only way to refatten the calf is to bring in new customers, so they'll unshittify it for the fresh infusion of customer money.

It's a cycle, and one I predict will inevitably lead to many of these companies' collapse.

[frevib]

> It's not "enshittify or lose"

I think it’s “find natural monopoly and reduce costs (aka enshittify)”.

Github is a natural monopoly and users cannot go anywhere. Unless you’re famous like Mitchell Hashimoto.

[ahartmetz]

Depends on how strong a moat really is, but it can be "enshittify and lose", too. Enlightened (as opposed to short-term) self-interest may pay off after two years or twenty, depending, and in the latter case, it may as well not pay off at all as far as a public company are concerned.

[frevib]

I think Microsoft’s home game is “monopolize and enshittify”. They are the masters and know the exactly what amount of enshittification is too much. E.g. Hashimoto quitting GH is probably totally worth the 10 SREs they fired. Us plebs cannot go anywhere.

[ahartmetz]

But you totally can go somewhere else? E.g GitLab (which is, unfortunately, about as slow as GitHub, but with a better license and owner) or sr.ht.

If you think you need those sweet GitHub stars, I can't help you.

[ngruhn]

It's move fast and break things.

[butterlesstoast]

I can't help but think it's a bit more complicated than that.

GitHub back in the day was a healthy version of "Move fast and break things". I wonder what's different.

[weavie]

The idea was, move fast and break things - but then pick them up and fix them. Companies realised they didn't really have to fix them properly as the users still stuck around.