alt Hacker NewsSalesforce 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.
Replies
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.)