[idan]

Hi there! Longtime fan and hubber here.

It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there's ~180m GH accounts nowadays)

My version of your post reads differently:

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

Walking away would be easy. I felt that way when I left Heroku ~six years ago. I left that job and never opened the Heroku dashboard again, after nearly a decade of happy use. I felt that it was irredeemable, and though it took a while, Salesforce did eventually succeed in running it fully into the ground.

I don't feel the same about GitHub. It is precisely because it's precious that I can't walk away. I'm not the only one here who feels that way.

In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. But none of it feels like the Heroku/Salesforce debacle. Occam's razor applies here: it's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale, and a fundamental shift of the ground under all of our feet.

I hope we do the things that will make you want to come back. I hope we spark that joy in you again! It's not stupid to have big feelings about something that is so central to our lives as developers. Fuck that noise.

[margalabargala]

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

This is true but misleading. Unfortunately.

It is a true statement for developers working in GitHub at Microsoft. It's not a true statement for users.

There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.

[stock_toaster]

Strongly agree. And not only that, but time has _already_ shown the continued degradation of the github experience even with users ostensibly sticking around trying to "make it better".

[jomar]

Indeed. Back in 2018 and 2019 I expended a fair amount of time and energy reporting a squash 'n' merge metadata rewriting bug to GitHub and advocating for the behaviour to be changed. [1]

Once or twice someone internal to GitHub got interested... and then drifted away again. Years later the broken behaviour remains. And I'm a lot more cynical about thinking GitHub fundamentals might ever get any better.

[1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368

[goodmythical]

I'd honestly argue the opposite. Staying with an abusive partner is not likely to resolve the abuse, no matter how much you think so.

Ghostty and others leaving might be the only way that active users could actively and visibly signal a need for change.

[lossyalgo]

I think OP is basically applying "vote with your wallet" strategy and/or some kind of "action speaks louder than words". As I understood from the article, they have been vocal about trying to change things, but they are shouting into the ether since nothing has changed and in fact only getting worse.

[rob74]

Vote with your wallet, or, if you're not paying anything, your feet.

[meken]

There’s a difference between a relationship with a person and an organization. I think the difference is large enough that the analogy doesn’t really hold.

[zamalek]

Exactly, only humans should have at least one chance to grow and improve. Orgs are heartless legal entities that deserve no loyalty whatsoever, they are all one acquisition away from turning on you (as a customer or an employee).

[rob74]

Organizations are made up of humans too... but, the bigger they get, the less you notice that. Back in the day when GitHub was still a small company with one (very good) product, I can understand having a feeling of loyalty towards them. Since they are part of M$ and more beholden to M$'s KPIs then to their users, sticking with them only because of nostalgia is probably ill-advised.

[pinkgolem]

I think the example is still valid, orgs will not change if the still get what they want from you

[hiccuphippo]

For businesses, staying signals their KPIs that everything is great and there's no need for change.

[idan]

I do work at GitHub. I shared the above as a nuanced "yes and" to the pain that Mitchell is feeling.

In the same way that Mastodon didn't replace Twitter even when Twitter went to shit, I don't believe in the various GitHub alternatives becoming a broadly-used thing. Maybe we'll end up with more GitHub-alikes like Codeberg, mabye we'll end up with some communities adopting novel forges like Tangled and Forgejo. But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated. Has the same energy as "20XX is finally the year of linux on the desktop".

My very personal hot take: the likeliest happy future is _most likely_ to happen through improving GitHub. I vote with my feet to do that from inside, and that's all I wanted to add. Hence "I hope we do the things that make you want to come back one day." I believe in it enough that I choose to work here on exactly that, because like Mitchell, I care very much about the platonic ideal of GitHub. He's ready to move on, and I'm not yet. There's no value judgment hiding inside that.

[kstrauser]

> But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated.

I've moved my projects over to my own personal Forgejo (when I don't care about collaborating on them) and Codeberg (when I do). I find that ecosystem vastly simpler in the common ways that matter. For instance, viewing large diffs and syntax highlighted files is unbelievably faster, about as fast as GitHub's use to be before it was "improved".

For every way I use those forges as a solo or small-group contributor, the alternatives are as good as or better than GitHub today. Some product manager could become a company legend by figuring out how and why that is, then getting someone to do something about it.

[rob74]

Yes, sure! OP didn't say that there aren't alternatives or that the alternatives aren't any good, they just said that GitHub is so huge it will probably continue to remain relevant, no matter how bad it gets. And they have a point - X is one example, but even SourceForge (remember SourceForge?) is still around, despite being an undeniably shitty platform that tried to install adware on their user's computers.

[kstrauser]

But OP did say the alternatives were “so much more complicated”. If you showed a new dev both GitHub and Forgejo, I’m not sure they’d notice the differences other than the latter being much faster for many common operations. It and Codeberg aren’t more complicated in any tangible way.

If GitHub’s internal thinking were “well at least we’re easier than Codeberg”, then they may find that the moat isn’t nearly so deep as they might hope.

[someguyiguess]

Ah yes. Just like how Blockbuster Video remained relevant and everyone still uses it today.

[margalabargala]

I'm glad you are optimistic. GitHub will need employees with that attitude if they're going to pull out of their current trajectory.

To be clear- from a user perspective, "improving GitHub" means "restoring reliability to what it was 6 years ago". There's no killer feature that makes people stop leaving, if my PRs don't lead every third day and actions never work.

[grogenaut]

I may have my timelines wrong but I don't remember github being rock solid 5 years ago. I remember multiple outages keeping us from pulling code for go packages that were not using an enterprise dependency cache and killing multiple days of work a year for those systems. It's what I used as a forcing function to move people TO an enterprise dependency cache, and to find the few scofflaws running work code off of github.com versus enterprise.

[margalabargala]

You're right. I was misremembering this graph:

https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

[grogenaut]

Actually to me the answer is Ms made them get more accurate in their graph. It was definitely not Rick solid in 2015-2018

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452011

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/31/github-goes-down-and-takes...

[nathan11]

Another line on that graph should probably be "January 7, 2019: GitHub offers unlimited free private repos". I can't imagine that helps with service stability.

[tlunch]

That is a pretty wild graph

[slowmovintarget]

Security: No leaking PII, no compromised build pipelines.

Uptime: 4 9s minimum for paying customers for the core service (not necessarily the social features, but pull requests have to work).

[pcdevils]

More AI it is

[WD-42]

Comparing to twitter is astute, as there are some analysis that point to it being mostly bots in 2025.

I can see the same happening for GitHub, in fact it seems to be actively trying to move in that direction: a platform for AI agents to host code, to review code, with little to no human activity.

Just like everyone who didn’t want to deal with bots left twitter, they will soon leave GitHub for similar reasons. I’m sure there is a future for GitHub as the code hosting platform for agents but it should be no surprise then when real people like Mitchell and the rest of us jump ship.

[komali2]

> But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated. Has the same energy as "20XX is finally the year of linux on the desktop".

This is funny, because 2025-on seems to be starting some couple years of Linux on the desktop/laptop. Valve introduced millions of people to gaming on Linux, bazzite is exploding in popularity, and that popularity is pouring into other projects like Omarchy, Mint, Ubuntu.

GitHub maybe will end up like Twitter - where the people who are there are there because they have to be, while the people actually enjoying their time online are on different platforms.

[pinkgolem]

I joined a startup 3 years ago as employe 6. everyone was using windows but I was used to working with macos so I got a mac.

Took a year till everyone was using a Mac.

[jospeh554]

Most places I've worked I've had the autonomy to re-install my machine to whatever OS I worked with, so was always Debian Linux.

Then I joined some mega-corp, with it's structures and set systems, so opted for a Macbook.

Worst mistake of my life, OSX is horrid, I'd rather use Windows.

[someguyiguess]

Lack of knowledge about something can certainly make it seem horrid. It just means you have a lot to learn. There is a reason so many of us engineers with decades of experience in Windows, MacOS (and OSX), and Linux use a Macbook Pro as our daily driver.

[nuc1e0n]

Maybe you can install homebrew and open source apps to make it more Linux like, but you'll still be stuck with Mac OS's shonky window and task management UI unfortunately.

[someguyiguess]

I found that part ironic and tone deaf as well. Like, read the room buddy. France just announced they're officially moving from Windows to Linux. The country of France. I think OP is looking for a single lynchpin moment where things change from one way to the other. Where in reality, things rarely happen that way. It's a slow and steady shifting away from one thing towards another.

[altairprime]

I think a better comparison would be between GitHub and 1Password. Both started out as really excellent things for individuals and both became really awful things for individuals in their pursuit of enterprises.

[NetMageSCW]

What do you find awful about 1Password today?

[altairprime]

When I quit using 1Password, it was when they dumped native apps for electron apps and quit supporting the product I’d been buying upgrades for every couple years, in order to pivot to a cloud model that lets them imposing an enterprise subscription model for enterprise users onto individuals. Dunno what they’re up to these days, but I’d be shocked if they could last six months without enterprise customers, so I know I’m not relevant to them anymore. And that’s the same way I view GitHub — individuals are financially and strategically irrelevant to their bottom line.

It’s their right, certainly, but it means I use GitHub as a Google Site replacement and my only active repo is archived whenever I’m not pushing commits to silence all the unwanted crap that comes with a GitHub repo. I’d be daft to ignore free hosting and I don’t care in the slightest that it’s one nines. Makes me laugh every time, though, to think of all those billion dollar AI-layoffs businesses having to stop AI work for a day because AI proliferation broke the freemium model and GitHub’s too hooked on being home to unfunded, mission-critical infrastructure projects to close the barn doors on free.

[sersi]

So much to list:

- They ditched their previous android app for a new one that doesn't get the grandfathered accessibility access so autofill is mostly useless...

- On mac, safari integration is consistently flaky. It regularly keeps getting blocked in a loop telling me to unlock 1password when 1password has already been unlocked.

- Passkeys are unreliable to the point of being unusable

- Autofill frequently doesn't work well where for some reason the site with the same url as saved in 1password is not offered during autofill. When 1password used to work, it helped catch phishing attempts because it wouldn't show autofill on pages that do not match. Nowadays because of the shitty autofill, people get trained to go to the app, copy the password and paste it in the website. This means that it will no longer protect from phishing attempts

- The previous behaviour of saving any newly generated password as a password object (not login) was much better. Now newly generated passwords are only available in the password history of the browser extension you specifically used.

- I can't tell 1password to ignore a specific website

At this point, the only reason I'm not using bitwarden is that search is very slow on it with 2k+ passwords.

[zarmin]

> I can't tell 1password to ignore a specific website

They would say you can do that. Right click and choose "hide on this page" from the 1P menu.

But does it work?

No. It does not fucking work, because this company and their software is FUCKING SHIT.

[jorvi]

Just to add a dissenting voice to all the complainers:

- autofill on desktop is rock-solid, it virtually never fails, much less so than any other password manager autofill

- it works great with passkeys, again rock-solid, and again the best UX of any password manager. passkeys itself are also great

- OTP code integration (only use this for non-important stuff) works great too, again best-in-class

- switch to Electron was great for most, the Windows app sucked and there was nothing on Linux, now we have a good application across all 3 desktop platforms, although it was a slight downgrade for Mac users

- autofill works fine on Android 99% of the time

- 1Password CLI and SSH agent are interesting additions but SSH has a lot of paper cuts

In general, they have by far the nicest UX and UI of all password managers. And they really seem to care. They were the first to introduce stuff like "no automatic autofill" because of security implications, their vault spec is open source (in case they go belly up), they get audited regularly. They were the first to add passkeys and actually made a site (name escapes me) that shows which services have passkeys and how to activate them.

[Sander_Marechal]

I can't globally disable that "autofill" also hits "submit". I want to review what it autofills before I submit. I consider this a security risk. I can disable submit only on a login-by-login basis, and my coworkers are able to reenable it again. I can't globally disable it for myself.

[danhudlow]

This setting does exist for "Universal Autofill" [1] which is what I use instead of any browser extensions because I don't want to get phished when I'm not at my best. [2] [3]

On the Mac app, the setting is at the bottom of the General settings screen.

The downside to forgoing the browser extensions is that creating new logins is painfully manual. The risks of using the extensions just freak me out too much.

[1]: https://support.1password.com/mac-universal-autofill/

[2]: https://hudlow.org/2026/practical-antiforgery#two-steps-forw...

[3]: https://hudlow.org/2026/practical-antiforgery/demo/1password

[canes123456]

It much buggier for me since the enterprise/electron push.

Autofill frequently doesn’t work. Passkeys are unreliable. Creating a new password doesn’t ever get saved.

[nothrabannosir]

FYI I recently discovered a 1p browser extension feature named “Password Generator History”. It has a record of all generated passwords, whether their respective items ever ended up saved or not. Live saver.

https://support.1password.com/recover-unsaved-password/

[kstrauser]

Same here. I paid for my family's accounts for many years until the app suddenly became much worse. Honestly, Apple's own Passwords app has 95% of the features of, and the ones it does have work far better than the 1P equivalent. I can't imagine paying for a personal account again.

[techpression]

It’s getting buggier and buggier, not being able to fill in passwords properly is kind of a glaring omission of a password manager (and that’s on three different computers). They keep adding features but seem to show little interest in fixing bugs. I submitted debug logs, recorded videos etc but it just trickled out in the sand. And as another poster wrote, it all started going bad with the switch to Electron (might be the rust backend that is the problem, I don’t know and frankly don’t care, it just doesn’t work as well as it did before).

[someguyiguess]

People still use 1Password? There are such better alternatives. Why would you subject your self to that awful ux?

[pjmlp]

The only password manager that IT allows on their hardware, bought by your employer.

[altairprime]

I still use 1Password 6 to access my former stuff!

[codebje]

Not the parent, but the only thing I really hate about 1Password is that I can't tell it to never offer to save a specific site's password. I can turn off all offers to save passwords, or I can have the stupid pop-up ask me multiple times a day if I want to save that password. The pop-up chases me across the site until I get rid of it. Aarrgh. Blood boiling. Rage overflowing.

Other than that it's fine, I guess.

[throwaway2037]

I have the same issue when using Google Passwords. One specific example: Many of my bank websites require 2FA with a code via email, SMS, or token. Each time, Google Chrome asks me if I want to update the password with the 2FA token. I have no idea how to disable it. Am I doing something wrong?

[cout]

I have the same complaint about lastpass. With lastpass it's doable, but I have to keep looking up how to configure a site to never site and never ask.

[nine_k]

Speaking of a "year of Linux on desktop", it's mostly not happening because the desktop lock-in has largely eased. I of course love my Linux desktop, but I use relatively few native applications, and every one of them is multiplatform now. Windows desktop becomes less and less relevant in its own way, by degradation of experience, and by being replaced with consoles and the Steam Deck.

Same may happen to GitHub. CI/CD tools and workflows can become more portable and adaptable. Independent code review tools that can use GitHub API along with a few other APIs may become popular. GitHub will become one of, not the one. I won't call it a bad outcome.

[renegade-otter]

I think the same of AWS. There are alternatives out there, especially for small personal projects.

I use Digital Ocean and couldn't be happier. The bill is small, and it's refreshingly simple to host a container.

I still have battle scars from trying to set up AWS Fargate. It's just a hodge podge of corporately requested features at this point.

[lugoues]

Honestly many companies would do well to use these services. I think we get too much into the idea our apps need the same guarantees as the large products out there. Define your SLAs and then choose the platform.

[nashadelic]

Whats funny is that nearly every major desktop app and feature has come out on macOS first and windows has nearly always been an after thought

[lief79]

Starting when?

[jumpconc]

Windows 1.0, I believe. Xerox PARC invented the WIMP UI paradigm (windows, icons, menus, pointer), Apple commercialised it first, and then Microsoft copied Apple.

[scubadude]

GitHub lost me when Microsoft used my shitty code to train shitty AI without my permission.

[someguyiguess]

Wym? They had a banner up for months asking if you wanted to opt out.

[Lammy]

How do I opt out if somebody pushes a copy of my project's repo to their own namespace on GitHub?

[fragmede]

Who's this random somebody that has a copy of your code that you don't want shared or trained on? GitHub's no saint here, but it seems like that somebody is an issue, not GitHub.

[watwut]

It is actuly good for the ecosystem to have competition. Githubs quasi monopoly was a bad thing. And will continue to be a bad thing in the future if it remains

[xinayder]

> But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated.

None of the alternatives you cited are as complicated as GitHub. Also, GitHub started with this Actions bullshit which is just reinventing the CI wheel and overcomplicating stuff that was already made simple. The one thing I hate Forgejo about is for being compatible with Actions and promoting is as the way to go for CI, when you have much better alternatives like Woodpecker, where you can actually understand the underlying code for your CI/CD pipelines.

[godelski]

The problem is that from the outside it seems like Microsoft no longer cares about the product. So much so that "the product" has become "shareholders"[0].

We've just been moving into a world where metric hacking is the desired outcome, not an outcome to try to avoid. These companies are only surviving because of their monopoly statuses. Because of momentum. It's a powerful force. It's the reason Twitter still is around. The reason Facebook is still around. But them being around doesn't mean they're good. It doesn't mean they're useful. It doesn't mean it is a good product. It doesn't mean the users like it. It just means people are used to the way things are and they aren't angry enough to leave for something else. But these companies are actively creating friction for users, daring them to leave, gouging them for everything they can. FFS Microsoft is the largest contributor (even more than Valve) to creating "the year of linux". Sure, it'll never have M$FT's market share, but it sure is eating into their revenue.

We've all lost sight of what made software so powerful in the first place. Why it became so successful and changed the world. We used to ship good products that help people, make their lives better, and make lots of money in the process. Now, I think all that anyone cares about is the last part. Now we're actively being hostile to those that make the systems better. And that system is fucked up and will destroy itself. That's not a good thing, because it does a lot of damage along the way. It is a system of extreme myopia.

In the last 5 years I'd argue that most software has made my life harder and more complex, not easier. There are definitely exceptions to this (ghostty being a great example), but there is a strong trend. I know I'm not alone in this feeling and I think we're getting to a point where a lot of people are no longer willing to dismiss their own gripes. This is not a good sign...

I'm glad you're optimistic. I do hope things can change. And my frustration is not directed at you. I really do want you to be right and I really do want to see change come from the inside. But I do not think those leading the companies now have any foresight. To be honest, I'm not even sure there's anyone at the wheel. It feels like we've just let the market forces steer the ship. If the currents steer the ship, then there's no captain, regardless of who claims the title. Frankly, I don't want to be on a ship without a captain, but here we are.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM

[lacker]

> There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.

I feel like in a very mundane sense, I pay GitHub for a service, and they use that money to pay developers, to then make GitHub better.

It's tough to be working somewhere when usage is booming, and your service is crashing all the time. It's also tough to migrate your infrastructure between platforms, which it sounds like GitHub finally has to do in order to scale to the next level, to really take advantage of being part of Microsoft, although that has to feel pretty frustrating in the short term.

So hang in there GitHub team. Just keep fixing things.

[rob74]

The problem is just, you don't pay GitHub for their service, you pay Microsoft for a service called GitHub, and Microsoft will put your money in their "earnings" basket and do whatever they want with it. Not sure if the amount of money Microsoft gets from GitHub subscriptions directly affects how much "love" the GitHub service gets.

[phillipcarter]

Sure it does. Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone. And the social aspect matters too, even if GitHub really isn't a "social coding" site anymore. If great people doing OSS stuff are all on various GitHub projects, that encourages more good people to do good OSS stuff.

[margalabargala]

This doesn't apply to current Github issues, where rather than a lack of the "right" new features, it's just an escalating degradation of existing services that is the complaint.

The attitude of "stay to support the product" can prevent a better replacement. When Digg torpedoed themselves back in 2012 or whenever, that exodus was a big part of Reddit growing from niche to dominant.

[bombcar]

The only users who can push for features now are those who can somehow directly influence people working on GitHub (a small number of users) or those with massive purchasing accounts that can shake Microsoft itself to its core (governments, fortune 100 companies).

I suppose us "normals" can push by making it easy to replace GitHub with something else, so that they start risking losing it all.

[bluefirebrand]

> Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone

That's the job of GitHub's product and engineering teams, not the users.

[roastedfunction]

To add on, GitHub has made it explicitly clear that they are both not working on features to focus on their Azure adoption and many core projects are in stasis even from community contributions.

https://github.com/actions/checkout#note

[phillipcarter]

No. Products don't magically get good because people conjured up features from thin air or just copied a competitor. It is very much a two-way street, especially when the product acts as a platform that tries to support heterogeneous use cases.

[bluefirebrand]

It is not the users job. Literally. If you want that kind of feedback from users, then identify your power users and offer them contracts and money.

[phillipcarter]

Yes, it is the job of users to advocate for the products and platform they use if they want certain use cases to get better and features to be built.

[jumpconc]

What is your BATNA? If you are going to give them money no matter what they do, they have no reason to listen to your feedback. At all.

[jordemort]

I used to work at GitHub. I think you should find a new job.

Before Microsoft came along, the entire company was aligned from the bottom to the top around the goal of delivering a single great product. As soon as they bought us, that changed; there were now lots of ways for an individual to succeed at GitHub-the-division-of-Microsoft that had nothing to do with GitHub-the-product. Now GitHub doesn't even have its own top, the org chart just smears into the Microsoft one at some hazy point. Perverse incentives abound.

An organization like Microsoft can never recreate the magic that was GitHub. There's just too many competing interests and agendas that have absolutely noting to do with making GitHub better. In the time before I left, I actually encountered many people who didn't care if they were making it worse, if it advanced their other goals.

[roland35]

This isn't a surprise at all. I saw the exact same thing at Meta. The incentives are so strong to improve your individual performance that it's hard to resist, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.

Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.

[ryukoposting]

Maybe I'm naïve, but it seems like the people who keep their eye on the ball and really try to make a great product are the ones who win out in the long run.

If you optimize for performance reviews, you'll make a lot of money, yeah. But you'll eventually find yourself overemployed and incapable of keeping up with that gambit anymore. Or, you'll find yourself doing something you never wanted to do. In extreme cases, it's like those people at Palantir in that post last week, realizing they're the bad guys. Usually it's just looking at your calendar on Monday evening, seeing a wall of meetings from 4PM to 9PM, and telling your kid you can't go to the park today.

Meanwhile, the "product people" I know well are all doing really cool stuff during the day, then going home to enjoy their lives. They don't make as much money, but they're happy.

Quote that one Wu-Tang song today, and you'll be quoting that one Talking Heads song in a couple years. I guess.

[Loquebantur]

"Maybe"? You actively enable that corruption and advocate for turning a blind eye to it and the consequences.

Those "overemployed" people are your bosses, indeed unable to keep up, steering you into the situation of "those people at Palantir".

When things spiral downward, telling yourself how you're "relatively fine still" with blinders on short-term, "works" just up to hitting solid ground.

[ryukoposting]

Believe it or not, some companies are run by people who just want to sell widgets and get on with life. Some of them even have morals! Shocking, I know. Smaller companies, sure, but they'll still pay you a good living wage anywhere but SV. Not every boss is a megalomaniac.

[aylmao]

I think this can be true at the IC level and in situations where the organization's success depends on the product being good, but that's not always the case. Big companies with market control can go years, or perhaps even indefinitely make bad product decisions and still print money. Product development comes to revolve less around merit and more about appearances.

I've worked in big tech and had the sort of conversations with my managers where they say: "The work you're doing in X is great. I use it and it really needs work. But it's not a priority, or even 'impactful'. Your work on X is effectively equivalent to doing no work".

Sometimes it isn't even about getting a promotion, sometimes the implication is you should be worried about keeping your job. You can still do X which everyone knows is great and someone should do, but "on your spare time, as an extra" because Y is what your performance review will really revolve around.

The sad part is I can tell they mean it, and do agree someone needs to work on X, but it isn't their decision to make, because they have to show face and explain to their manager why an engineer earning XXX,XXX didn't meaningfully work on Y. Ultimately someone up the chain who you've never talked to is the person who decided X is unimportant; they don't want to kill it they just don't use it, or have a strategic reason to not care about it.

In the politics of upper management perhaps it was something an adversary used to vouch for, and now you have to prove the org can do without it. Or perhaps it's the ace in your pocket, and you wan't it to be lack-luster so when the big boss above you starts talking about retirement, you can show amazing wins in the area and be first in line for succession. Companies are not democracies. For better or for worse big companies are not democracies, they are feuds, so if the kingdom isn't in danger its future comes to depend a lot not on what's the best decision, but how a decision fits the game of thrones.

[edoceo]

Protec ya Neck but what's the other one?

[Lammy]

I assume they meant C.R.E.A.M. :p

and probably Once In A Lifetime

[ToucanLoucan]

I would argue it goes even a step further: any org the size of Microsoft struggles to maintain the quality of... well, anything. And, added to that, Microsoft seems exceptionally bad at doing fucking anything now. Azure is a complete mess, Windows is an utter dumpster fire, the office suite feels like it gets just slightly worse with every update, Copilot is a fucking joke compared to every other AI on offer (and hilariously, will agree with everything I've said here!), they won't even use their own frameworks to develop software anymore!

Microsoft is literally too big to fail and it's their sole asset at this point. When companies like Github get bought by Microsoft, I just put a clock on the wall in my mind. Just a matter of time before the shit seeps in.

They can't help it. They are organizationally unable to function. It's so much worse than misaligned incentives and redundant management (though those are factors): they seem culturally, institutionally, unable to just... DO ANYTHING. Everything they do is 1 step forward and 4-20 steps back. They are too big and they should be broken up for their own good as well as the good of every user of their software.

[TheMagicHorsey]

This issue of large organizations making shitty products seems to infect every company except for a handful. Even Google, with all its good intensions, by 2010 was full of political animals climbing ever higher on the corporate ladder while management struggled to set incentives correctly to make the company product focused.

Its just unbelievably hard to nail the culture and incentives in large organizations. Some notable exceptions: Sony in its first 3 decades, Toyota in the 70-90s era, Apple after the return of Jobs and till his death, and one could even argue Microsoft in the era of Windows 95 till about Xbox 1. Maybe even Tesla and SpaceX.

Something hard to quantify happens when the culture of product erodes and the culture of politics virally infects a company. I witnessed it at a couple of big companies ... Intel in the late 90s, Google in the 2010-15 era (working as a contractor looking in).

Hats off to people like Jobs and Musk who could grow product culture at scale ... I can't even say I've been successful at fostering this kind of culture in startups under 500 employees.

[deaux]

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

It is a megacorp that is mainly in this situation because of its relentless pursuit of exponential growth for the benefit of a very select few to the detriment of everyone else (including GitHub employees such as yourself). The hockey sticks are there, but how they've reacted to them - which is what has lead to this situation - is entirely because of the above. If not for that, it could've reacted to them differently.

It does not deserve to get better.

It would be very good for society if GitHub's market share massively declined, if everyone moved away. It wouldn't be good for you personally, but it would be good for everyone else. There is nothing positive about a single company having access to everyone's code.

Just look at all the tricks you've been playing, automatically opting everyone in to having their code used for LLM training. [0]

GitHub shouldn't get better. It should decline in popularity.

You know full well that it is undeniable that your competitors gaining market share would be good for everyone as a whole, but comp juicy and emotional attachment to people there and the pre-acquisition times where it used to be a great company (those times are not coming back) and your past with them etc.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_po...

[jrochkind1]

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?)

[WD-42]

Did Heroku ever actively degrade? Seems more like it was neglected until the competition eclipsed it entirely. What GitHub is doing seems worse, like true active regression.

[idan]

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 burning people out!" It was very clear they did not give a shit about us, as evidenced by resources.

It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them.

What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be. A home for all developers, playing a central role in the production of both public and private software. That alignment was never there with Heroku/Salesforce.

GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster. Much much much faster. 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. GitHub in 2026 fundamentally resembles a pre-PMF startup in many ways because of that. I'm obviously not an unbiased observer, but I wouldn't count us out just because it's an uphill. Everyone's on that same uphill.

Having experienced both firsthand, I fundamentally disagree that there's a parallel. GitHub/MSFT has the median amount of corporate bullshit. Not more, not less.

[amluto]

> GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster.

It’s grown in a way that degraded it and that required actual effort. For example:

- The fancy new diff viewer frontend that barely works. Someone wrote that code — it didn’t happen by itself.

- The unbelievably buggy and slow code review frontend (which is surely related to the diff frontend) was added complexity that did not need to happen. Its badness has nothing to do with how many users use it. It’s just bad in a no-scaling-involved way.

- GitHub actions. It’s … bad. I suppose there wasn’t a predecessor that was better.

> 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."

No, it did not have to expand into the AI field. A competent AI-free GitHub Core that could have an optional AI layer on top would have worked just fine if not dramatically better than the current mess.

(I say this as a paying user who will probably cancel soon. The Copilot reviews are kind of nice, but they’re not any better than a third-party system, and I’m getting sick of GitHub not working. Plus, the repos I’ve already migrated off of GitHub get to have nice non-AI things like gasp service accounts.)

[AlphaSite]

I knew a guy who worked on it tell me actions is just literally a fork from Azure Devops. Which is why it never really fit into GitHub.

[kdazzle]

I have heard this also. I still find it wild that Azure DevOps had that feature long before GitHub

[ragall]

> GitHub actions. It’s … bad. I suppose there wasn’t a predecessor that was better

There might not have been a predecessor, but it's been obvious for at least a decade that GHA are a very poorly designed programming language, yet nothing was done to improve. They introduced Github Apps that solve many of the issues with Actions, but that requires deploying a service and aren't anywhere near the ease of use of Actions.

[Simran-B]

Isn't it a dumbed down version of Azure Pipelines?

[ragall]

It depends on whether its authors were aware of Azure Pipelines and used them as a source of inspiration. Perhaps.

[amluto]

Amusing new observation due to today’s outage [0]: apparently GitHub never bothered to do the obvious optimization to the /pulls page: when you load it with the default “is:pr is:open”, they seem to be depending on their heavyweight search service, despite the fact that their normal API can enumerate open PRs just fine (and probably at dramatically lower cost to them). Sometimes the common case of a webpage should be simple instead of a relying on something fancy.

[0] Which has been ongoing for hours but hadn’t started when I wrote my comment. https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/x69zbgdyfzg0

[kryogen1c]

> It’s grown in a way that degraded it

Im an outsider and a layman, so this might be totally off base, but...

The way I hear people talking about github reliability doesnt sound like scaling problems to me. If you drive 20 miles every day but then decide to drive 2000 miles and run out of gas, thats a problem of scale. If you drive 2000 miles and your engine explodes, thats a problem of design.

Maybe their design problems are being made evident because of sudden scale, but they're still design problems.

[IanCal]

I think the fair side of this is that you have to make tradeoffs when you design things. Scaling problems are design problems, but whether they were mistakes or not really depends on how predictable that scaling was.

Car analogies are typical, so I'll add in there.

My car can take the four of us, and we can load it up with things from the shops. I can put a bunch of heavy tins of food in there, or some DIY things, but if I put several tons of stones in the boot it'll totally fuck it up.

Is that a design problem?

Not really, it's a relatively cheap regular car, and it failed at a certain scale.

It would be a design problem if it were a flatbed truck, despite it being the same scaling that showed the problem.

Making my car resilient enough to take that weight would require tradeoffs that would either make it worse for other jobs I want it to do or at least add significantly to the cost.

This is similar in engineering software systems too, you can make it handle scaling up better, but this can require a much more complex architecture that may make it slower at smaller scales. It can make it more complicated to work with, add additional risks of failure as well.

[lwhsiao]

> And it's had to expand into the AI field

Maybe a hot take: no, it didn't.

I think it had all the pieces (api,cli,etc.) already that it would've still be very useful in an AI world without deeply integrating AI things (copilot, etc.). I'd take higher availability over AI features any day.

[ragall]

> What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be.

Yes, and what Github wants public github.com to be is free QA for Github Enterprise. My company is a paying customer with 200 engineers and it's pretty clear we're just Guinea pigs for the Enterprise product.

[jrochkind1]

Thanks for your perspective, appreciate it!

[IanCal]

> central role

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.

[jrochkind1]

The federation thing isn't just github of course.

I think the general answer is that it would take real development effort to make federation work, and having to have compatibilty with other installations slows down your own pace of possible features -- I think these things are undeniable. Arguably worth it for society/the community (I wish we had more open standard federation and less centralization), but from the point of view of the company will it actually lead to increased profits sufficient to justify? In fact, it may do the opposite, if you are one of the largest, then lock-in is better for your profitability. Compatibility with other services is only important for the small upstarts trying to get customers from the largest.

I don't like it, but I think we will get proprietary centralization as long as we have capitalism of the sort we have.

[IanCal]

I get what you mean, I think what I'm pretty stuck on is what is the centralisation solving? Federated messages dealing with lots of things flowing back and forth and live updates, etc is one thing - but what is it about GH that makes much of a difference when things are in one place or many? Much of the work is done in very isolated sections.

Imagine each organisation/user was run with completely isolated data, and you used something like google sign in for auth (so one global sign in, then oauth).

What wouldn't work? Global search, that I get. I struggle to think of other things though. Maybe whether links between issues across orgs updates? Every commit, diff, code browser, permissions for writing, reading, org level search, stars, would work with zero federated sort of search-y things. Package management, issue tracking, all that would be the same.

Forks followed by PRs? Not sure that would be much different - maybe you'd have to raise an issue on the original project with a link to your new repo & branch.

[jrochkind1]

Hm, thinking about it.

Some of my attraction to github is just that I am used to and like the UI, and I get annoyed on another platform where I don't understand the UI and don't know where to find things or how to do things (like set up free CI for open source project, or debug existing CI for a PR).

Other than that... auto-linking to issues, prs, and code (with auto-expansion of excerpt in issue) cross-project is nice?

But you are right, git is theoretically something where separate projects are fairly isolated, which does make it more mysterious that competitors are having trouble and it seems like github has some kind of network effect lock-in anyway. It's a good question.

[chimeracoder]

> 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?)

This pops up on here frequently. People misremember the Heroku timeline with Salesforce. Most of Heroku's growth and glory days happened after the acquisition. Salesforce actively invested in it and turned it into the powerhouse that people remember today.

At some point, they stopped, and it's not clear why.

People flip the order of the first two and remember it as "Salesforce acquired Heroku and then they went on a downward spiral" but that's not really what happened. There were many years of growth in between, including the period that almost everyone who remembers Heroku fondly remember it for.

[jrochkind1]

I am aware, and I am often the one making that point -- but here we have someone who worked at heroku saying he experienced the SalesForce acquisition as immediately negative and with signals that it was not going to get better and this caused him to leave, so I was discussing within that narrative. I was more intersted in learning about his take from his experience than in trying to tell him he was wrong and salesforce was great for heroku despite his experience working there?

But yes, heroku from the outside kept doing quite well for the first years of Salesforce ownership, whether becuase they let them alone and kept their budget going, or whatever. That's why I suggested that from the outside github's slide was much faster.

idan (who again, tells us they worked at heroku) replied to me in this thread:

> 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 burning people out!" It was very clear they did not give a shit about us, as evidenced by resources.

> It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them.

At the point we're quoting other people's replies in other parts of the thread becuase we're not all even having the same conversation anymore, we're probably done!

[devin]

If anyone reading this is curious of their own, you can go to https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE and fetch it.

My ID is just over 10,000. Crazy to think of the journey that I've had in computing since I signed up for GitHub.

[psadauskas]

Fun story about that: In Ruby 2.x, the version GitHub originally launched with, every object implemented the method `id`, which returned the object id (in 3.x, it was renamed to `object_id`). Every object had this id, ActiveRecord models, strings, floats, integers, booleans, etc. Some objects had fixed object ids, like `true.object_id #=> 20`, `false.object_id #=> 0`, `123.object_id #=> 247 (2n+1)`. The `object_id` for `nil` is `4`.

Yehuda Katz was the first external user of GitHub after the cofounders, so his github user id is `4`.

The way Rails works, if you want to look up a user record, you do it by id:

    author = comment.author
    user = User.find(author.id)

Now, if there was some bug, and for some reason a comment had no author, `comment.author` would return `nil`, `nil.id` would return `4`, and the UI would show Yehuda as the author in the UI. People would ask, "Who is this Yehuda guy, and why is he commenting on my PRs?"

[byroot]

Similarly, when writing Facebook apps with Rails, when you'd hit that same bug you'd see Mark Zuckerbeg: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=4

[tksb]

These are the fun anecdotes that make perusing comments here so worth it. Thanks for sharing!

[sikozu]

I love this story, makes me wonder how many other fun bugs on GitHub have been lost to time.

[Dragonai]

This is too funny. Thanks for sharing this tidbit!

[rapind]

1,202 if we're bragging.

TBH I'm not super invested in github. I pay for it (smallest plan) and use it as a repository and for forking other projects occasionally, and for hosting some small-time static sites. I've never really needed any of it's other features. Every time I go to github.com there's more and more cruft though, which to me means that I'm not their target customer and they will inevitably either alienate me or jack up their prices. Happens every time there's an acquisition so I'm kind of used to it now.

Github has remained surprisingly useful for quite a while post M$ purchase, but I'm old enough to know that everything M$ touches eventually goes to crap. It's like a law.

I remember using CVS and Subversion though, with very limited hosted options, and I thought Github was the bees knees at the time.

[vhodges]

I am 22095 on GH but 213 on Sourceforge :-D I have a 5 digit user id on Slashdot as well (~20k mark if I recall).

[kstrauser]

My Slashdot ID's under 4,000. It makes me a little sad that I can't bear to use it anymore.

[FireBeyond]

My ICQ number was 5 digits. Was always funny towards "the end" when I'd give it to people and they'd wait for more digits.

[vhodges]

Yeah, I haven't been there in years.

[aa-jv]

3-digit Slashdot user id, reporting in.

I, too, wish Slashdot was worth visiting again. I spent so, so many years there, enjoying the hell out of it since it was Chips&Dips ...

[sandbags]

Surprised to find I am #79.

I think that was down to being in a particular IRC channel when CW & co. were building it.

[peter_griffin]

Congrats, never thought I'd see 2 digits in this thread haha

[girvo]

Ha, HN is exactly where I'd expect to see 2 digits personally

[uggedal]

#72 here. Got access to contribute a small PR to one of Chris Wanstrath‘s projects.

[sandbags]

I bow to you 7 times

[mcphage]

Nice, someone even lower than my #297!

[sandbags]

In fact now I think about it my claim to fame used to be that Github used one of my Rails plugins. I had written a really simple versioning system (Rails 2 I think) that I used for my blog and they used it, IIRC, for versioning wiki pages.

[bratsche]

Mine is 2041.

When I was working at Microsoft I got transferred over to GitHub for awhile and someone there noticed my ID and made a big deal out of me having a 4-digit ID. :)

I never thought about it before then.

[mreid]

Thanks for sharing that link. My GitHub ID is 484.

I had no idea that I joined so early. It says I joined in 20/2/2008. I guess I was following some of the founders' work in Rails when GitHub was announced and must have signed up shortly after it got started.

[hexis]

I'm 13936 and I felt like I was SO LATE to the party when I signed up.

[incanus77]

I'm 17722 and also felt late. I was a holdout on Subversion and was resistant to Git in general since SVN still worked fine and had good tooling, but eventually some client work moved to Git and thus eventually Github.

[kolanos]

We must have joined around the same time, 17498. Funny to call us late when this would have been July 2008, or ~3 months after public launch.

[embedding-shape]

I'm ~46,0000 and I thought I was early!

[Lalabadie]

I'm around 1M and I have a three-character username, which also feels like I was early

[fud101]

I was too loyal to mercurial, only switched to git/github long after the battle was lost and won.

[dylanz]

Hah! I was too. I was at a bar with Chris trying to convince him to base the company off of hg instead of git but they already had the domain name and had already started building it.

[dylanz]

13274 here!

[30minAdayHN]

Hello late bloomers, 143370 here

[tksb]

Genuinely surprised to be just over 10k too! Felt late!

No idea how my two character handle made it through… Probably the wrong thread to ask anyone at GH to allow me to block notifications anytime anyone mentions "@ts" but I've come to accept it at this point, lol.

[steve_adams_86]

I was late to the party: 457,207

Created at 2010-10-27T23:42:22Z. 16 years! What a wild ride. I used to use bitbucket a ton back then. I loved it.

https://api.github.com/users/steveadams

[loopdoend]

Top million though! Still earliest 1%.

[fernandopj]

For comparison, I'm 208,820 and we're in the same year: I got that number 2010-02-23. So GitHub more than doubled user count that year, impressive for a "late to the party" growth.

https://api.github.com/users/fmalk

[section_me]

I'm at 18 years and ID 1653. It took them a while to gain traction.

[steve_adams_86]

They actually had meaningful competition back then, too. Bitbucket had free private repos and hg support! Back when that was still a topic.

[idan]

hah, my cheat here is https://github.com/YOURHANDLE.png

Will redirect to an image file whose title is your user ID! :D

[bewuethr]

I love that https://github.com/yourhandle is an existing organization.

[kemayo]

Genuinely surprised that I'm only 2,187. Weird to think about how quickly I must have jumped on it.

[sikozu]

My user id is in the 2,660,000s, 2012 here and I joined when I was 13.

[woadwarrior01]

I can't believe I joined Github back in 2009. I was a hardcore Mercurial fan and user back then. :)

[godzillabrennus]

April 27th 2010 and I felt pretty good getting a five character name (my own name). My ID is 254XXX

[Ringz]

Around 40000 and a real name with 4 digits. Thought I was late.

[fragmede]

In the 40k range too. I was too cheap at the time to pay for anything or else I would have signed up earlier.

[larrywright]

10126 here. I wouldn't have guessed it was that low.

[johnwheeler]

You're going to crash the server.

[Lyngbakr]

Wow — I'm user 404!

[cyberpunk]

I'm user angry unicorn... :}

[SwellJoe]

It was going to crash, anyway.

[microtonal]

Woah, January 2009 (in the 40,000s), like some others I felt I was late to the party. I guess not :).

[hfknight]

938555 / 07.26.2011, late for the game but man 15 years, memories came flooding back

[pico303]

And here I thought I was doing well at 47979. That was January 2009, so not too bad.

[burnte]

wow, I'm in the 6.3 million group, 2014. I am surprised it's both that low and that old. Nothing compared to 5 or 6 digits, though. :D

[chrisweekly]

Thanks for the link.

ID: 67,498 Created: 2009-03-26

17 years, a month and two days ago.

[xmlninja]

33000 something, nov 2008. Just interesting to see how the growth escalated in 2009 judging by other comments here as well.

[mfkp]

I was a day after you, march 27th. #67730

[yhager]

heh, beat you by three days, ID 65973, 2009-03-23 :)

[nullstyle]

366; nbd

https://api.github.com/users/nullstyle

[infogulch]

133882 / Oct 1st 2009

[rossriley]

Nice, mine is 5082

[bsimpson]

926648 checking in.

I had just tried asking Gemini to help me get there, and it kept telling me to read line 2 of github.com, as if they were serving JSON on their homepage. :facepalm:

[gwittel]

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

At a basic level I appreciate this sentiment. However, the common dysfunction I see in large corporation is its not the lack of people who give a shit. Its lacking a sufficient number of people in positions of power that give a shit -- such that they can actually make change happen.

All too often competing pressures (features, profit, delivery speed, politics) take precedence; not leaving time for things that would really move the needle. In essence, too many leaders are happy to ship garbage; they don't care (or don't know).

If Github were to put out a statement saying "service quality is our priority", it is fairly meaningless. If they added "here's how we'll get there", maybe it helps some. Moreso -- "from now on executive compensation is tied to these SLOs", then maybe something would actually happen.

[cogman10]

The issue is that modern software businesses aren't encouraged, in the slightest, to care about polishing products.

The company leaders only care about features shipped. That's it. They only polish those features if they are shipped in such a broken fashion that they are actively causing outrage. Once the features are shipped, it's done, any additional resources on an already shipped feature is seen as wasted.

This permeates all aspects of modern corporate software, unfortunately. It's why the likes of C# and .Net is forever adding new frameworks and language features while abandoning the existing frameworks. It's why Microsoft has had more new UX frameworks than OS releases. It's why for the same setting Microsoft now has multiple panels for the same information, literally a panel introduce in windows 98, Vista, 10, 11.

The only time a company like MS kills a product is when that product competes in the same space as an existing product. For example, it's why they killed wordpad. It was offering features too close to what Word did for free.

The fact is, it costs almost nothing to add a feature. It costs a ton of money and resources to properly integrate, use, polish, and remove places that feature fits into. I can't imagine the amount of money MS paid to integrate copilot into everything.

[cm11]

I think it's true that lacking sufficient numbers in power is essential for change, but I also think there is a lack of people who give a shit. I've had many 1-on-1 conversations, some lunch casual and some more directly syncing on a project, wherein we'd come to straightforward conclusions on next steps. And then we'd have full team meetings to make official decisions and I'd find myself alone asking questions about a leader's out of the blue contradicting proposals. I'm not sure how one functions in this (I guess typical?) environment.

[pushcx]

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

What's the mechanism of action here? What changes if I stay? What changes if I give more or less of a shit? Is there javascript telemetry feeding my shit into a dashboard with a calibrated shitometer for executives to consult when they set quarterly objectives? My account is six weeks younger than mitchellh's and I've been watching GitHub fall apart for the last year, what will happen because I stick around to watch for another year? Besides that I will get covered in shit.

You're an employee. What changes if you stick around? Back in October 2025, the GitHub CTO Federov prioritized moving to Azure above feature work (https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...). Yesterday he recommitted to it (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...), writing "We started executing our plan to increase GitHub’s capacity by 10X in October 2025 with a goal of substantially improving reliability and failover." GitHub has had six bad months of increasing bugs and sharply decreased uptime, and the CTO just recommitted to staying the course. You've explicitly been directed to move to Azure, not to give a shit or to make things better.

So I'll defer to your direct expertise. From the outside, Heroku stalled and died because Salesforce prioritized everything else in its business above Heroku. Are GitHub's priorities so different? Does you giving a shit make Azure and Copilot the best top priorities for GitHub? Will Azure and Copilot be why I stop seeing SPA jank? Will Azure and Copilot be why I can see my list of open PRs? Will Azure and Copilot be why I see something more than the 500 unicorn? Will Azure and Copilot stop the spam PRs that want to undermine the quality of my code? Will Azure and Copilot lead to anything other than the same corporate dismissal and dysfunction that led to Heroku? Will you giving a shit matter?

[Lammy]

> In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into.

Excellent example of why centralization is a bad thing. A Git “hub” is not a thing that should have ever existed for a self-described “distributed” version control system.

[block_dagger]

Decentralized networks benefit from hubs if they benefit a subset of the network, which GitHub has for a long time. A hub is a focal point and there can (and should be) many of them in the git "network."

[idan]

Shrug

Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion. There's nothing magical about git remotes. Just add some more, figure out a process that works for you, have fun!

In reality: when I want to send a letter I don't want to figure out a process from scratch. I want to go to the local post office, buy a stamp, and post a letter.

Convenience is a spectrum and different people land in different spots. What irks me is when I lack the choice. And that's not the case here.

[antonvs]

> Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion.

Do you mean Git, not Github? Because Github is centralized by definition, “using it in a decentralized fashion” doesn’t make sense.

[mmooss]

Github isn't a public good or a person; it's a product for a for-profit company, whose aim is to squeeze profit out of you. They care nothing for you and will dump you the moment it's profitable.

I would invest your energy in something worthwhile like an open source project, a non-profit, a social or political cause, a family memeber, etc.

> Occam's razor applies here

I think the simpler explanation is clearly that it's a for-profit company and these problems aren't worth fixing, and not a speculative engineering excuse. If Microsoft wanted to invest more, including in uptime, they could make it happen. They have over a trillion dollars.

[steve1977]

I fully agree with your points but have to mention that market capitalization is not money available to the company. Microsoft is valued over a trillion dollars at the stock market, Microsoft doesn't "have" a trillion dollars they can spend.

[yeahforsureman]

Just an observation: The different approaches mentioned in the replies to this post seem to all neatly fall into one of the three types of individual response (exit, voice, loyalty) there are to any sort of decline in/of firms and organizations of any kind within Albert O. Hirschman's well-known economic framework, originally laid out in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970).

Personally, I find "loyalty" perhaps the most fascinating one of those, being "irrational" for the individual almost by definition but sometimes, for example, proving out to be the only "glue" holding an organization together through a period of incurable-looking decline followed by an eventual recovery (in the lucky cases).

[mritchie712]

looks like you work at github.

I completely understand a "people who give a shit stick around" mentality if you work there, but you can't expect users who run a business on it to stick around if it's broken.

[blanched]

I don’t think they were trying to hide that - they said they’re a “hubber” at the top. Maybe not obvious, but not obfuscated.

[idan]

Correct, sorry I thought this was pretty obvious but in retrospect maybe not.

I'm not encouraging Mitchell to stay, I'm saying that my version of his post is about _me_ staying to make a brighter future, and adding my context on why I still believe that.

And finally I closed with "I hope we win you back" to be extra clear about it!

[gilrain]

The problem is that you decided the correct place for your “version of his post” was in the comments to his version of his post. This rhetorically implies you’re offering your version as an alternative to his, and it explicitly sets up your version as a comment on his version.

And then you claim your version is only about you. Why post it as a reply, if that’s true? It would be off topic. But it isn’t off topic; because actually you are talking about OP in addition to yourself.

[biggoodwolf]

"Stick around to make it better", exclaimed the abusive partner.

[zhynn]

I found out today that I am user 6082. I have been using github since the rubyconf (railsconf? I can't remember) where it was announced. I loved octocat. I was a git fanatic. It has been extremely disappointing.

I am using fossil now. I kind of love it, just a sqlite file with a very trim binary to interact with it. I get all of my things that I want (wiki, forum, issues, docs, etc) all in one file.

But that's just for fun. At work we are still tied to Microsoft Github. Just typing that out feels dirty.

[mylons]

github hasn't absorbed agentic coding, though. agentic coding has absorbed it, and as a result it's quality is suffering.

the thing about github that is so maddening is linus gave us the secret with git itself. then we reinvented centralized source control using git and called it github, and here we are.

[injidup]

Decentralized version control only works if there is some way to find and access those distributed repositories. For many reasons and no matter the tech there is always a drift towards having a centralized registry so that the degrees of separation for individual actors is minimised. Be that a search engine or code forge or social network.

For *most* users, fully distributed and disconnected is a bug not a feature.

[jospeh554]

I don't miss the days when every project had it's own SVN server....

[ben0x539]

Say what you will about github-the-source-control-platform, github-the-unified-login-for-bugtrackers has been a huge success.

[section_me]

As someone with the ID 1653, I've totally given up on the thing. I've even created my own rust based forge, ironically, hosted on github at the moment.

[6031769]

If you are still hosting there I do not see how that means that you have totally given up on the thing.

[timcobb]

Github is Microsoft, who even cares? How can ppl be so caught up in a brand name? Microsoft doesn't care about you, why do you care about Microsoft? Things always change, just move on when the time is right.

[jospeh554]

And it's just a host of git, you can just jump platforms...

This is like crying that your favourite IRC network goes, then you just jump onto OFTC

[timcobb]

Totally. And a small correction I think to your analogy is:

It's like crying when your favorite IRC network gets acquired by a crazy person (eg. Freenode) and refusing to jump onto libera.chat. I get network effects make a scene, but still, come on, new Freenode is not Freenode, it's just a name. Time to move on!

[hbmmkhufcjn]

> Github is Microsoft

> Microsoft doesn't care about you

> why do you care about Microsoft?

You answered your own question there, mate.

[timcobb]

I didn't? What's the answer? Sentimentality? Inertia?

[bbor]

What you built was a community, not a website owned by Microsoft — it could port just fine to GitLab.

“I won’t leave, I’ll fight to make this place better!” is a laudable trope ofc, but in this case you’re not making any place better, you’re just defending shareholder value. IMHO :)

[golddust-gecko]

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

At best that's half of the equation. You also have to continually hire new people who give a shit, and you have to do that within the context of Microsoft.

Given the rot already evident, there really isn't any incentive for people who care to join. They would have to care more than the organization does about the product, and there would have to be many of them.

Once product in large companies get to this point, there's no real way back. Quality will max out at the minimum required to retain the revenue. And if that fails for too long, it'll be put in product hospice.

[rglullis]

> t's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale

Besides "That's what makes us money and pays my bills", there is no real reason to keep building github as this centralized, all-encompassing system that needs to work at global scale.

Engineering is about understanding that everything is about trade-offs, and eerything keeps pointing out to the fact that wrong choices are being made there. You can throw as many people as you want or all the MS money at it, but as long as Github "engineers" that keeps overindexing on Efficiency at the cost of Resiliency, it will feel like this pile of unusable crap

[stock_toaster]

  > My version of your post reads differently:  
  > "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
  > Walking away would be easy.

Yeah, be careful not to gaslight yourself into trying to "tough it out" with bad vendor relationships. Sometimes you do need to know when things aren't good/healthy and it is time to walk away, as sticking around just ends up being needlessly flagellent.

Especially with corporate owned software or SaaS ecosystems!

Sounds like you made the right choice with Heroku back in the day. I feel like this is Github's Heroku moment.

[CalRobert]

The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.

[spaceribs]

Considering the size and scale of Github, do you feel like it's become closer to an infrastructural public good rather than a privately owned product?

The amount of impact I've seen to businesses around the US at least might as well be akin to a Covid shutdown, and that certainly has me thinking about what the overall impacts are on the US economy overall.

[idan]

Caveat, I'm not a lawyer, I don't speak for the company, yadda yadda

It's a product that is _de facto_ present in nearly all developer scenarios. There are scenarios where I personally believe public management is better than private management, e.g. single-payer healthcare is strictly better than the bullshit we have in the US now. It's fundamentally cheaper for the polity when the government negotiates with healthcare providers than each private insurer.

I don't think that's fundamentally the problem facing GitHub, and I don't think it would be better in any way — for anyone — if it were regulated like a utility. But again, I write javascript for a living. Take what I'm saying with a big-ass rock of salt.

[somat]

git is an infrastructural public good. github is a company that sells you git adjacent services.

Speaking of git adjacent services. Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize? I tend to have an aversion for signing up for stuff so have never had an account on either, but they had a lot of momentum. And them shutting down that service feels like the inflection point marking the end of the "don't be evil" period, A lot of open source projects got burned in that one. That or when they bought YouTube instead of developing their own google video further.

[tonfa]

> Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize?

My guess is that abuse (people hosting files/data that google didn't/wasn't allowed to host) made it untenable for a service that wasn't generating revenue and had limited headcount.

Something like Google drive or yt could spend a lot more energy stomping it rather than the handful of folks from the open source programs team.

[theojulienne]

I used to be a hubber - I really hope that institutional change happens at GitHub and I'm glad there are people there still fighting for it. I left because caring deeply (maybe, like the OP, too deeply) for the platform wasn't enough to shift many layers of leadership to focus on performance and reliability. Watching it crumble and lose its early-days focus on engineering excellence was just awful.

Even when we had a CEO telling people to focus on making GitHub Fast (<3), telling people to do what made GitHub better and not what people thought would make Microsoft better or make their jobs more secure to MS (because Microsoft bought GitHub because GitHub was the important thing, not so it could be a consumer of Azure) - it was still an uphill fight to change mindset and it didn't go anywhere meaningful.

I really hoped that others would be enable to enact that change after I left, but everything coming out of GitHub makes it look like the core focus is still not on making it fast or reliable or just better overall for people. If a blog post about GitHub's availability still includes the world's third-best major cloud provider as name drop on a solution, people are not focusing on making GitHub better. They are focusing on being part of Microsoft. Make GitHub better first, buy more super fast computers with the fastest everything you can buy, or at least use the best or second best public cloud provider, then work out how to leverage Microsoft to do it in-house or cheaply later. A GitHub that nobody wants to use is a bad investment for Microsoft.

Also, rip out 90% of default feature bloat integrations from initial page loads, add them as discoverable drill-downs or optional things to enable if people need it. Adding every feature under the sun (and copilot) on every place you can think of might read nice, but if you then fail people's most basic needs, you're worse off. GitHub still needs to function as the basic tool for all the future stuff to work. Accept the agentic coding paradigm shift and focus on making the tools faster for the hot paths rather than every path - and yes, that means removing stuff from the hot paths. GitHub today is like a maze, layers of settings and features, like nobody is thinking through UX anymore. This seems unrelated to performance, but this sort of "throw everything at the screen" style of UX is also what leads the backing systems to crumble under load.

[mh-]

I appreciate that you're staying inside with that mentality.

Like Mitchell, GitHub was once a dream job for me, and it just never lined up pre-acquisition. I shared many of Mitchell's habits too, about GitHub being my reading material. Until some time after passing 2000 starred repos, I had literally read every line of code in each of them. GitHub still feels like home to me, as a user.

Good luck, and we're all counting on you.

(359439, which is quite high for this thread, it seems!)

[rao-v]

As Albert Hirschman observed in reflecting on his seminal "Exit, Loyalty and Voice": "an organization needs minimal, or floor, levels of exit and voice in order to receive the necessary feedback about its performance".

Don't feel too bad, you are both essential to the process that ends in Github improving (or imploding).

[willio58]

The heroku mention here struck a chord for me. I don’t feel as attached to GitHub for some reason but Heroku was the first web host I used where I felt like “this is how cool a web-based tech-oriented product can be”.

So crazy to see how money can ruin such a good thing.

[zhiyan]

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

No. It only gets better if people who stick around give a shit - not the other way around.

[pluc]

This is called brand loyalty, and it's one of the first thing they'll abuse.

[vpribish]

fuck microsoft. it absolutely is the big badness of that monster. microsoft's sick monopoly has dragged humanity back by years from where we should be. every hour wasted, every email lost, every skilled career sacrificed to their garbage is the future lost.

[leethargo]

I didn't know this was a sport. I'm GitHub user 43053 :-)

[cess11]

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

This only works in democratic settings. In capitalist corporations, typical liberalist parliamentarism and so on it does not work, only coercion does, which might be peaceful, like a strike or boycott, or it might not be.

[brailsafe]

Fyi your HN description still says Heroku

[idan]

derp, haven't touched that in a while. TY!

[codesnik]

huh, I've never thought to check my github id. I don't remember myself being an early adopter.

[fcoury]

Holy crap, just found out I am 1371. Wow.

[siva7]

I'm wondering now how the heck we ended up so early on Github. It was back then just a small unknown startup but i'm not sure what connection we first 30,000 users share. At the same time i remember there must have been also some connection to Y Combinator back in 2008. Is there a way to see my own history of probably first commits or activity on Github? Oh, i found out. It was the early Rails Community on Github. That's probably what the first Github Users all share in common.

[jannyfer]

I'm user 7xx,xxx but I also believe I created a Github account while working on Rails projects (basically copying Ryan Bates and assembling things together. haha good times)

[saint_yossarian]

That was my connection too! I joined in 2008 when I got my first Rails gig where they were using GitHub, which I hadn't heard of before.

[Sander_Marechal]

145XXX and I am on the other side of the world, no connection to SV at all

[pimeys]

I'm also surprised. I'm user 34967 and I was pretty far from Silicon Valley when I joined in late 2008.

[wyclif]

Where are you finding your join number on GitHub? I just spent a few minutes looking at my profile and settings, but I don't see it anywhere.

[hughdbrown]

curl -s https://api.github.com/users/mitchellh | jq .id

[ahartmetz]

You sound like you just want to make the world a better place /s

[grimgrin]

github is their precious. i’ve heard it called that name before, though not by them /G

[idan]

shrug, I can't fix a lot of things in our reality, but I'd love to leave software development in a better state than when I found it