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cortesoftyesterday at 11:24 PM1 replyview on HN

I don't feel like this article really answers the question of why this is the wrong shape. CI takes too long? What else?

You can make your CI less intensive, that doesn't require a different Github. What features would a 'differently shaped' platform have?


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weitendorftoday at 12:22 AM

I'm not going to pretend I know how to do Github better than Github, but I almost can't believe how poor their support is for fine grained access tokens, org/individual credentials, etc. are in the same era as Copilot/VSCode/AI devtools and vibe coding, as they drown in a rapidly growing volume of agent-driven usage.

It's going to keep growing way past how it is now. I often drive 4-8 agents at a time, many in the cloud or on different machines, and use github as a kind of send-off point or starting point literally every single time. In a couple months I hope to be doing that with 10-20 and if it were cheaper I'd go even further, because why not? But even now I'm spending $0.25-$5 every single time I send out an agent to do a sizable thing and obviously they are positioned to capture some of that, because nobody else just lets me pay them $5/mo for git and basic hosting that Just Works (when it's up) and gets out of my way.

So why do they not want me or anybody else to pay them to create delegated/short-lived identities, or at least make their auth token story better so that if there is a way to set that up properly, people use that instead of sending commits "Co-written by Claude Opus 5" (literally every single commit by Claude is a missed opportunity for Microsoft to provide a real identity/auth solution for coding agents)?

Why is there no Mythos-like code review specialist model that for non-F100 companies to get defensive cybersecurity reviews? Or why not even just a cheap and good / smart and fast specialist to review my agents' or my own work for problems. Have they not even talked about doing that? I'm not going to pay some chatgpt wrapper company run by 24 year olds to do that, I want to pay the company that I already pay for that kind of stuff, that has the most data of anybody in the world to do it.

Why can't I gig out work on github either? Do you know how many developers there are on the periphery that want that kind of work and spend their time on reddit/discord/github trying to break into the industry? If I could chuck $5 at some task for a guy in another country trying to break into software to do, without all the overhead and sketchiness it involves now, why wouldn't I do that? That's literally the same thing that people do with LLMs.

Why does github codespaces not have some SKU/version for colleges to offer students as learning environments or companies interviewing developers to use for dev environments? My company tried working on this btw, and the only real barrier to entry is how much you need to trust a company to give them all your developers' credentials by virtue of having root on the computers their credentials and IP come from. It would be 1000x easier to sell this to non-enterprises if your name was Microsoft, and everyone was already your customer and trusting you with identity/ip anyway.

Github actions are not interesting to me because I can just ask my computer to create a cloud vm and test stuff in there, and it does, and I don't have to configure YAML or learn some specific way to do it. That's like the opposite kind of product github should focus on, it's almost a market for lemons because if your usage is enough for the profit to matter to Microsoft you can just pay a guy to migrate you to any other compute provider. Github has unique/best-in-the-world assets and opportunities for products and services with way better margins/growth because of how deeply the global software and developer community depends on them.

Let me pay $1/mo/delegate identity and $100/mo on bounties and $10/pop on interview hosting and $0.10/hr for agent sandboxes. It would be so much easier for Microsoft/Github to create and win these markets than anybody else and it's where the growth is

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