alt Hacker NewsYeah, I had the exact same response after reading the post. I mean, I'm all for jumping on the Microsoft hate train, but not if it misses the elephant in the room. Let's say the _perfect_ GitHub replacement spawns tomorrow? What's preventing the same infrastructure challenges of millions of lines of AI-generated code destroying it?
I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.
Replies
Saas code hosting seems to be the problem here. If companies self hosted, they could deal with the scaling problems themselves.
> I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.
Private corporate codebases are a poor fit for GH because they don't benefit from public social graph effects. And the typical codebase isn't so large as to be technically challenging to deal with with OSS tools. I'd guess they make up a substantial share of revenue.
But once the reliability is called into question, self-hosted or smaller alternatives start to look good. Although there's some trickiness there if you want to be super cautious about making sure you can get to your code+infra in case of a vendor incident, especially if you're cloud based.
Because if you were building GitHub from scratch today you wouldn't build it the same way and would benefit from many of the technological advancements of the last 2 decades (nearly).
I dont even like AI much and this still seem to me like yet another instance of people blaming AI for normal mismanagement and failure.
>What's preventing the same infrastructure challenges of millions of lines of AI-generated code destroying it?
There's something called "rate limits" that engineers not working for GitHub have probably heard of; it's this crazy idea that you should limit the load on your infra in order to avoid downtime. GitHub is not the first free service to ever have to deal with bots.
of all the awful things AI is doing and will be doing to society, killing centralized code hosting and social media will be its shinniest moments, both deserve to die painful deaths
Why is centralized code hosting getting killed? I'm running an opensource project, >99% of the code is AI generated, could not do this without GitHub. Ai generated source code needs a place where AIs and people can collaborate. I'm expecting GitHub to be hugely successful, but mostly for an AI audience.
> I mean, I'm all for jumping on the Microsoft hate train, but not if it misses the elephant in the room.
That elephant didn’t even exist yet for the first few years of poor uptime shown in the graph in TFA… I don’t really disagree if we’re talking about the recent uptime issues, but how does that explain the years 2020-2023?