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by sebastiansm7 43 days ago
I think is more related to vibe coding
5 comments

Definitely not, I remember some 4 years ago some random bug in a github-supported github-action and a comment in an issue saying: "I heard the team responsible for this action was laid off, don't expect a fix". This was shortly after the microsoft acquisition.

But the vibe coding BS probably made it 10 times worse.

> I remember some 4 years ago ... This was shortly after the microsoft acquisition.

The acquisition was 8 years ago.

They started with a hands off approach and then went hands on, I’m not sure but that ‘hands on’ timing is likely to happen shortly after the usual acquisition vesting period of 3 years when the old guard starts to leave.
Yes you are correct, ~4 years ago was when they had a lot of layoffs at microsoft and github. Initially after the acquisition it was mostly fine, but after the layoffs it was a noticeable degradation in service quality and reliability.
> But the vibe coding BS probably made it 10 times worse.

Yup, keep seeing this in various companies. Teams that were effective and did solid engineering now are more effective and does even better engineering. Teams that were effectively already just "boilerplate monkies" now produce a lot more code than before, but the quality is the same so effectively they're worse at contributing now than before, and take more shortcuts, not less.

From my point of view, agents are amplifiers, so if you usually build spaghetti projects, agents just help you do that faster, not avoid the spaghetti altogether. If you usually build well-designed stuff, they can help you put that together faster.

Agreed. In general the amount and variety of bugs introduced since everyone started vibing is worrying. It is probably a national security concern but I guess so is the economy tanking due to failed AI investments. Guess we will see
I'm not sure it's specific to vibe coding so much as the AI feature add rush. Every SAAS company is throwing more shit at the wall than I've ever seen, to the point where I'm actively avoiding some software because I don't want yet another new feature release pop-up when I log in.

Add in them being extremely high scale and critical infrastructure and it's easy to see where things can go wrong, vibe added code or not. I think we'd all prefer they have long slow roadmaps but clearly leadership thinks they're in a fight with the other AI companies to release the newest and bestest every day.

In terms of at Microsoft's end, or in general with the amount of new repos and pushes / commits from other people vibe-coding?
GitHub actions sucked and fell over itself long before vibe coding became mainstream.