alt Hacker NewsGitHub is sinking
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I went to look at a repo on Github today. Clicked on the "xxx commits" link to see the commit history, and got told I've hit a secondary rate limit and need to wait.
I'm the only person on this network that would even look at Github, and my connection has a dedicated IP, no CGN.
“GitLab - enterprise grade, meaning it’s bloated and confusing but it’ll impress your boss. This could be the choice if you need multiple meetings to make the choice.“
lol!
Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up.
Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub’s core features.
For $5 a month I can host a server and put a bunch of projects on there. Yeah, I don't have a million stars on my repos but it works for what I need and I can give access to whoever I want.
I'm not sure what to make of the graph.
On the one hand the acquisition of GitHub may have caused the availability to be worse.
On the other hand, the 100.00% availability before the acquisition looks suspicious, wondering if it's not just the status page being better updated.
(I'm aware of the recent availability problems with GitHub, but on the graph the problems start in 2020 and don't seem to worsen significantly)
It sort of feels like no major open source repository can be possibly left well enough alone. I remember how SourceForge went down the drain, it's a real pity to see same happen with GH.
Side note: I read the URL as "dBus hell". We've all been there m8
Living in Eastern Europe has its perks. I hardly ever notice big GitHub outages because of time zone.
I'm also happy with how generous their free hosting and actions are.
I left Github because of some very strange activity. I had a new folder named "feature" added to one of my repos. At the time I had failed to turn off the AI integrations, so I figured that was the problem.
There is no way I'm going to let a VCS put code into one of my repos without my asking for it or consent. Full stop. I moved all my significant code to codeberg but kept the github account, so my username doesn't get squatted.
I often think about how I’d do it if I ran my own company.
I would really like to see what it would be like doing all code reviews over email. The repo would just be a simple vps-style server with git-only ssh access, there’d be a particular for-review/ branch namespace for code to be reviewed, and CI would just be a bot waiting for branches to show up and would mark refs as good or not by just annotating/tagging them. It could reply in the email thread with results too.
The mailing list would have a web archive viewer, naturally. That’s how you could look at old reviews. There’s tons of existing solutions for this, and it’s just html.
Chat would be on IRC with bots to archive the channels. Easy as hell.
The whole thing (except maybe the CI runners which need beefier hardware) could be done on a very cheap server.
GitHub is waaay over engineered for what you need to run a software project. Look at the Linux kernel, they just use a simple mailing list, and it’s debatably the most successful software project of all time.
Issue/bug tracking is scarier though. Because I’d probably want to yak shave my own solution and get too involved with that and not even focus on what the company does. Maybe it could be a bug tracking software company?
"If Linux can be maintained by sending patches to an email mailing list, “doesn’t work at scale” arguments are skill issues."
Agreed. Sick of the bloatware.
Who cares about bugs when their developer velocity has increased 5x!
I like the "written by human" banner at the bottom - that's a first for me and will be glad to see others adpot similar.
>Written by human All opinions are my own and not those of a large language model. Everything I write is one hundred percent human. Because I care!
The issue is every AI coding tool integrates as a "GitHub App" (OAuth, PATs, webhooks etc.) first, over other code forges. This load is coming through their 3rd party app integrations. I bet the web/git volume isn't getting smashed as much.
I had to begrudgingly use GitHub over my preference GitLab to use some 3rd party AI features.
The solution for GitHub is to charge or rate-limit some of these 3rd parties integrations and come up with an equitable solution.
One shift in perspective I had was realizing that github is not just a code forge, but a social network.
So, what's the actual real alternative ? The one that also supports open source projects ? Ironically gitlab is costlier than github, and not without their faults, but that's "maybe" the only other alternative here, anything else ?
Github still doesn't support SHA-256 git repos (https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/12490) even though their competitors (Gitlab, Codeberg) have that for ages now.
I installed forgejo on my home server and never looked back. The only problem I face is when hosting an app on DigitalOcean App platform, or vercel etc. They only connect to GitHub.
I would not be surprised if AI commits are the culprit. There is no way any service would cope with a constant stream of unfettered commits by sleepless always-on agents. Ironically, this same strategy seems to be what GH/MS (and other big companies) are evangelizing - and therefore dying by their own hand (in a way).
AFAIK Sourceforge is alive and kicking, and it has an "Import from Github" feature that has been available for years.
Agree with Gitlab as an enterprise alternative. Beautifully boring and safe to have complex teams and permissions. Also has a good enough Terraform support, and a nice workflow to host docker images
I wasn't expecting to see the outages being nearly the same even before the 2023 ai inflection point
Anyone would buckle right now. Microsoft just sucks more at it.
I think they went too far with AI internally. Complete collapse in quality of internal engineering practices.
People used GitHub's free infrastructure for over a decade without complaining. Now AI-generated spam and massive amounts of low-quality code are increasing costs everywhere, and suddenly GitHub is the bad guy for acting like a business. Criticizing centralization is fair, but pretending GitHub gave nothing to open source is just dishonest. Alternatives today, are probably going to be flooded by the low-quality AI generated code tomorrow...
onedev onedev ondev
I still don't see this tool when it's about a forge. It is a fantastic tool. Seriously guys, you should really consider it !
Related:
Ghostty is leaving GitHub
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579
Before GitHub
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940921
Days without GitHub incidents
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48012022
GitHub Actions is the weakest link
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47933257
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
I have lost count of how many times something went down on GitHub ever since documenting it on this comment chain [0] and also predicting 6 years ago [1], that going all in and centralizing everything on to GitHub was really not a good idea if you need stability or to push a critical fix and your GitHub actions doesn't work.
Now, are you going to finally self host or should we continue to expect another outage on GitHub?
This time, there is no CEO of GitHub to help us. It is Copilot, and Tay.ai that are still struggling to maintain GitHub.
It will be a long way before GitHub dies, but it is definitely sinking. Slop is killing it. I think Microslop, 'xcuse me, Microsoft, realises this too, but there is nothing they can do now that they committed to AI fully. I feel sad for the GitHub engineers, because they write pointless blog entries nobody believes anymore. Meanwhile existing services erode in quality. It's like in a submarine. You have one hole. You manage it. Well, more and more holes pop up the following days. We know where this is headed then ...
Extinguish
Everyone wants to pin this on the Microsoft acquisition or incompetence but it seems pretty clear to me from the material GitHub has posted that AI has 10xed the amount of code being committed to GH, which has downstream effects everywhere - CI, Actions, code ingestion, everywhere. The author pins it on weird things like MS Copilot, which kind of feels like he’s listing off things he doesn’t like rather than casual favors. This is ignoring the 800 pound gorilla in the room.