Having managed GitHub enterprises for thousands of developers who will ping you at the first sign of instability.. I can tell you there has not been one year pre-AI where GitHub was fully "stable" for a month or maybe even a week, and except for that one time with Cocoapods that downtime has always been their own doing.

In a (possibly near) future where most new code is generated by AI bots, the code itself becomes incidental/commodotized and it's nothing more than an intermediate representation (IR) of whatever solution it was prompt-engineered to produce. The value will come from the proposals, reviews, and specifications that caused that code to be produced.

Github is still code-centric with issues and discussions being auxilliary/supporting features around the code. At some point those will become the frontline features, and the code will become secondary.

Text is cheap to store and not a lot of people in the world write code. Compare it, for example, to email or something like iCloud.

Also I would guess there would be copy-on-write and other such optimizations at Github. It's unlikely that when you fork a repo, somewhere on a disk the entire .git is being copied (but even if it was, it's not that expensive).

The instability is related to their Azure migration isn't it? Cynically you could say it hasn't been helped by the rolling RIFs at Microsoft

I think the instability is mostly due to the CEO running away at the same time as a forced Azure migration where the VP of engineering ran away. There’s only so much stability you can expect from a ship that’s missing 2 captains.

after microsoft acquired it, they greatly expanded the free tier allowances, and they still seem happy to dump money into it

That doesn’t make sense. Commits are all text. If YouTube can easily handle 4PB of uploads a day with essentially one large data center that can handle that much daily traffic for the next 20 years, GitHub should have no problems whatsoever.

This.

But also, GitHub profiles and repos were at one point a window into specific developers - like a social site for coders. Now it's suffering from the same problem that social media sites suffer from - AI-slop and unreliable signals about developers. Maybe that doesn't matter so much if writing code isn't as valuable anymore.

Counterpoint: Ai coding without GitHub is like performing a stunt where you set yourself on fire but without a fire crew to extinguish the flames

> worried for the future of GitHub

Oh no, who would think about the big corporations? How is Micro$lop going to survive? /s

Fuck GitHub. It's a corporate attempt at owning git by sprinkling socials on top. I hope it fails.

If you need to host git + a nice gui (as opposed to needing to promote your shit) Forgejo is free software.

Or they'll just keep forcing policies that let them steal the code you post on GitHub (for their AI training), and make everyone leave that way.