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daemin
latexr
> and in the Github copilot case because I guess they're trying to contribute to open source for whatever reason.
The “whatever reason” can be to build a portfolio to apply for jobs. Or worse, to more quickly build trust to exploit vulnerable projects.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/04/why-powerful-but-hard-to...
pvtmert
Whether or not Github themselves create these issues or pull-requests, some bunch of folks will do that (manually) for sure. I mean the Hacktoberfest is coming soon, so is the low-quality typo-fixes. Since now there is Claude-Code, Cursor et. al, I am really curious how people are gonna fight with the pull-request spam. Especially open-source projects which claim they do not accept LLM generated content.
P.S: Most people just do it either to "light-up" their Github profile for job applications or just to get cheap swag...
oefrha
Yeah, as a maintainer with fairly popular projects (at least more popular than any project from the linked issue reporters, I’ve checked), I’ve gotten exactly zero Copilot issue or PR. As for useless review comments, lol, nothing beats useless comments from users (+1, entitled complaints, random driveby review approvals serving god knows what purpose, etc.), you probably shouldn’t be doing open source if you’re annoyed by useless comments.
And good luck stopping people from pasting from ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever. Those are free, unlike Copilot agent PRs which cost money, which is part of why I don’t see any.
I guess some people just have too much time and will happily waste on useless complaints.
the__alchemist
Same experience. Does anyone have info on this discrepancy in observations?
daemin
I read this article after it was shared on social media by the Codeberg.org account so I though it was a PR piece, as it doesn't mention self hosting at all, just moving to another hosted platform.
TiredOfLife
The article is by theregister.com. Basically The Onion of tech media
pier25
You can hide/disable all Copilot features in VSCode.
benrutter
Tangential, but I think github's secret weapon of inertia is. . .(drumroll) github stars.
They're still seen by a lot of people as a sign of project maturity and use. My unfounded suspicion is if they all dissapeared tomorrow, people would be a lot more likely to try alternative code forges.
I've been using codeberg of late, more because of their politics than anything, but in all honesty the user experience between github/gitlab/codeberg/sourcehut/gitea is near identical.
ivanjermakov
I think it's a lot harder of an OSS project not hosted on GitHub to find contributors and gain traction in general. Network effect, as always.
pornel
It depends where your contributors are coming from. For example for Rust, the crates index is the discovery mechanism. Contributors will come to your repo by whatever link you put in your package's metadata. I've split my Rust packages between GitHub and GitLab and don't see a difference in participation.
LtWorf
It's the way I want it to be honest. Keeps the low effort garbage away for the moment.
IshKebab
It's one factor but I think they have more important "secret weapons":
1. Network effects; people already have an account.
2. Free CI, especially free Mac and Windows CI.
wiether
You can add two more things:
- 2000 minutes of free compute time with GitHub Actions
- free Docker Hub alternative with unlimited pulling (they say that you're limited to 500Mb but I currently have probably +20Gb of images on my Free account)
They have the community aspect AND the freebies
jazzyjackson
I never understood going by stars when there's a much stronger signal in how many issues are being tracked and closed. Very easy to see if its software people actually use
zahlman
> a much stronger signal in how many issues are being tracked and closed
This is a strong signal, but what it signals is confused. How much of it is the nature of the user base in actually reporting issues? Suppose the project receives regular fixes and issues are promptly closed on average — how much of that is because the project has to constantly respond to external factors, and how much is due to developers doing constant fire-fighting on an intrinsically poor design and not getting around to new functionality? Suppose there are lots of outstanding issues — how many of them are effectively duplicates that nobody's bothered to close yet?
dvfjsdhgfv
Yeah, this is the first thing I check, and also I verify a few closed ones to understand how they were handled.
LtWorf
There are websites to buy stars :D It's like fake reviews.
3np
I've had an ongoing support ticket with GH for several months now asking them to actually disable Copilot, as there is Copilot all over and it's clear from inlined JSON on github.com pages when signed in that my account is actually opted in to Copilot features despite Settings page saying features should be disabled. I've never ever opted in to anything related to GH AI and am not a vscode user.
They keep closing the ticket and saying it's "with the engineering team". I keep reopening and asking for resolution, escalation, or progress.
GitHub did have working and professional support in the past but in 2025 they are just malicious.
It's surreal.
e40
Please point to the ticket so we can add to your voice.
3np
GitHub Support tickets are private and not publically sharable.
I did mention it in this Discussions thread a while back (which the support agent at one point in July hilariously linked me to asking if I had read, making it clear they hadn't done so themselves).
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/147437#discuss...
Initial support response mentioned here:
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/147437#discuss...
progval
Do you have an example of "inlined JSON on github.com pages"? I can't imagine what this looks like.
3np
Not near an account right now but literally just "View Source" when signed in and search for "copilot" and it's there along some other feature-flags for the user in a JSON blob inside a script tag.
63stack
Not sure why this is downvoted, I just checked and I do see a json object inside a <script type="application/json" id="client-env"> tag, that has all kinds of copilot related keys.
I checked my profile and copilot is enabled with a "lock" icon, I cannot disable it. I have never enabled it.
YJfcboaDaJRDw
[dead]
fatchan
Github is my push --mirror location, nothing more. Main is a popular Gitlab instance gitgud.io, and I host my own secondary mirror.
Gitlab is of course adding more AI and corpo garbage, and once they prevent disabling these "features" on community editions we'll see a fork of gitlab, probably.
The assertion that github is some bustling hub of opportunity is a strange one. At best you get people more likely to contribute because they already signed up, and a contribution from somebody not willing to sign up to another free service or simply email you an issue report is a contribution worth missing.
clickety_clack
Yep, the headline on the Gitlab landing page is now “Build software, not toolchains. With native AI at every step.”
I’d love to find a stripped down solution that focused on hosting code repos. I don’t think GitHub see it as their core business anymore.
Hasnep
I've been using Codeberg.org recently and really enjoying it, I just wish the CI situation was better, but I'll probably just host my own instead
chaz6
My prefernce is Forgejo
skydhash
I think it’s mostly people around the JS/Go/Rust ecosystems that tend to be vocal about GitHub being a community. For a lot of projects I couldn’t care less if it was just cgit or gitea.
It’s quite easy to setup git to send patch via email. And you can always use a pastebin to host the diff if you’re sharing ideas. Bit I guess that’s not as visible as the GitHub dashboard.
api
What is the actual rationale behind some companies literally shoving AI down people’s throats?
It’s fascinating stuff and can be very useful. Why does it have to be rammed so hard? I’ve never quite seen anything like this.
Or maybe I have. It reminds me a little of the obviously astroturfed effort to ram crypto down people’s throats. But crypto was something most people didn’t have any actual utility for. A magic tireless junior intern who had memorized the entire Internet is actually useful.
marginalia_nu
KPIs are likely the missing part of the puzzle. CEO wants AI engagement to go up, organization makes AI engagement go up.
If users don't want to engage with new AI features, the new AI features become unavoidable so that engagement goes up despite user preferences.
KPIs are a fantastic way for an organization to lose any touch with reality and can drive some truly bizarre decision-making.
api
Ahh, the reason we lost the Vietnam war.
marginalia_nu
"AI is the Vietnam of product management" is a blog post that almost writes itself. Not really my field so if anyone wants to take it for a spin, go ham.
acuozzo
> What is the actual rationale behind some companies literally shoving AI down people’s throats?
It's propping up the US economy and businesses mostly look at B2B signals. Keeping "demand" for AI high at e.g., Microsoft, keeps "demand" high on NVIDIA, CoreWeave, et al.
All of the boats are floating in the bathtub and nobody wants to be the one to pull the drain plug.
Traubenfuchs
Not old enough for MongoDB? Big Data?
AlexandrB
I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors to get it.
hyperpape
From Dan Luu (https://danluu.com/wat/):
> When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I was told that it's fine because it affects everyone equally. Since the only thing that mattered was my stack ranked productivity, so I shouldn't care that it impacts the entire team, the fact that it's normal for everyone means that there's no cause for concern.
Do not underestimate the ability of developers to ignore good ideas. I am not going to argue that AI is as good as version control. Version control is a more important idea than AI. I sometimes want to argue it's the most important idea in software engineering.
All I'm saying is that you can't assume that good ideas will (quickly) win. Your argument that AI isn't valuable is invalid, whether or not your conclusion is true.
P.S. Dan Luu wrote that in 2015, and it may have been a company that he already left. Version control has mostly won. Still, post 2020, I talked to a friend, whose organization did use git, but their deployed software still didn't correspond to any version checked into git, because they were manually rebuilding components and copying them to production servers piecemeal.
rossdavidh
All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince. But "AI" promises increased productivity as an individual, in the here and now. It should not be a hard sell if people found it to work as advertised.
crazygringo
> it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell
Writing unit tests where needed makes you more productive in the long run. Writing in modern languages makes you more productive. Remember how people writing assembly thought compiled languages would rot your brain!
But people just resist change and new ways of doing things. They don't care about actual productivity, they care about feeling productive with the tools they already know.
It's a hard sell when an application moves a button! People don't like change. Change is always a hard sell to a lot of people, even when it benefits them.
krinchan
As someone who started out a GenAI skeptic, I’ve found the truth is in the middle.
I write a TON of one off scripts now at work. For instance, if I fight with a Splunk query for more than five minutes, I’ll just export the entire time frame in question and have GHCP (work mandates we use only GHCP) spit out a Python script that gets me what I want.
I use it with our internal MCP tools to review pull requests. It surfaces questions I didn’t think to ask about half the time.
I don’t know that it makes me more productive, but it definitely makes me more attentive. It works great for brainstorming design ideas.
The code generation isn’t entirely slop either. For the vast majority of corporate devs below Principal, it’s better than what they write and its basic CRUD code. So that’s where all the hyper productive magical claims come from. I spend most of my days lately bailing these folks out of a dead end fox hole GHCP led them into.
Unfortunately, it’s very much a huge time sink in another way. I’ve seen a pretty linear growth in M365 Copilot surfacing 5 year old word documents to managers resulting in big emails of outdated GenAI slop that would be best summarized as “I have no clue what I’m talking about and I’m going to make a terrible technical decision that we already decided against.”
dcminter
It's an excellent point - but a lot of the pressure to use AI in orgs is top-down and I've never seen that with useful tech tools before; they always percolated outward from the more adventurous developers. This makes me wary of the AI enthusiasm, even though I acknowledge that there is some genuine value here.
bwfan123
I felt the same way. The analogy I use is management dictating the tech-stack to use across the org. It does not make any sense ! They need to stay in their lanes, and let engineering teams decide what is best for their work.
Big tech's general strategy is get-big-fast - and then become too-big-to-fail. This was followed by facebook, uber, paypal, etc. The idea is to embed AI into daily behaviors of people whether they like it or not, and hook them. Then, once hooked, developers will clamor for it whether it is useful or not.
crazygringo
> I've never seen that with useful tech tools before
I've seen it all the time. Version control, code review, unit testing, all of these are top-down.
Tech tools like git instead of CVS and Subversion, or Node instead of Java, may be bottom-up. But practices are very much top-down, so I see AI fitting the pattern very well here. It feels very similar to code review in terms of the degree to which it changes developer practices.
nlawalker
I think it's coming from both places, it's just that the top-down exhortations are so loud and insistent.
I wasn't around to experience it but my understanding is that this is what happened in the 90's with object oriented programming - it was a legitimately useful idea that had some real grassroots traction and good uses, but it got sold to non-technical leadership as a silver bullet for productivity through reuse.
The problem then, as it is now, is that developer productivity is hard to measure, so if management gets sold on something that's "guaranteed" to boost it, it becomes a mandate and a proxy measure.
torben-friis
We might be in the rare case where the current smoke and mirrors fad in leadership happens to be something actually useful.
Let’s not let the smoke and mirrors dictate how we use the tool, but let us also not dismiss the tool just because it’s causing a fad.
groby_b
AI is the first dev tool that makes a difference that is immediately noticeable even for higher layers, that's why they apply pressure.
The core problem, as OP called out, is change aversion. It's just that for many previous useful changes, management couldn't immediately see the usefulness, or there would've been pressure too.
Let's not forget that well-defined development processes with things like CI/CD, testing, etc only became widespread after DORA made the positive impact clearly visible.
Let's face it: Most humans are perfectly fine with the status quo, whatever the status quo. The outward percolation of good ideas is limited unless a forcing function is applied.
hn_throwaway_99
Surprisingly enough, and pretty ironic given this discussion is about GitHub, the company Dan Luu is talking about there is Microsoft (specifically the SmartNIC team), based on his Linked description of his 2015-2016 job.
bgwalter
Version control has quickly won. It was so popular that people kept writing new systems all the time. CI was popular. Most major open source projects had their own CI systems before GitHub.
"AI" on the other hand is shoved down people's throats by management and by those who profit from in in some way. There is nothing organic about it.
hyperpape
Version control is almost 50 years old. It has very slowly won.
AI adoption is, for better or worse, voluntarily or not, very fast compared to other technologies.
CamperBob2
Sounds like a company full of seriously-terrible developers, from which no valid general conclusions can be drawn.
I use AI a lot myself, but being forced to incorporate it into my workflow is a nonstarter. I'd actively fight against that. It's not even remotely the same thing as fighting source control adoption in general, or refusing to test code before checking it in.
tho2342o349423
At this point, pretty much all of the US markets (and the USD) is hinging on "unlimited upside" promised by techbros and their magic AGIs & robots. They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going.
Wonder what'll happen to JPY once the Yen-carry unwinds from this massive hype-cycle - will probably hit 70 JPY to the dollar! Currently Sony Bank in Japan offers USD time-deposits at 8% pa. - that's just insanely high for what is supposed to be a stable developed economy.
chubot
They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going.
Honestly I think the same thing happened with self-driving cars ~10 years ago.
Larry Page and Google's "submarine" marketing convinced investors and CEOs of automakers and tech companies [1] that they were going to become obsolete, and that Google would be taking all that profit.
In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It seems like the whole thing was cancelled in 2023, written off, and the CEO was let go
How much profit is Waymo making now? I'm pretty sure it's $0. And they've probably gone through hundreds of billions in funding
How's Tesla Autopilot doing? Larry also "negatively inspired" Elon to start OpenAI with other people
I think if investors/CEOs/automakers had known how it was going to turn out, and how much money they were going to lose 10 years later, they might not have jumped on the FOMO train
But it turns out that AI is a plausible "magic box" that you extrapolate all sorts of economic consequences from
(on the other hand, hype cycles aren't necessarily bad; they're probably necessary to get things done. But I also think this one is masking the fact that software is getting worse and more user hostile at the same time. Probably one of the best ways to increase AI adoption is to make the underlying software more user hostile.)
[1] I think even Apple did some kind of self-driving car thing at one point.
bookofjoe
Apple car project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project
>From 2014 until 2024, Apple undertook a research and development effort to develop an electric and self-driving car,[1] codenamed "Project Titan".[2][3] Apple never openly discussed any of its automotive research,[4] but around 5,000 employees were reported to be working on the project as of 2018.[5] In May 2018, Apple reportedly partnered with Volkswagen to produce an autonomous employee shuttle van based on the T6 Transporter commercial vehicle platform.[6] In August 2018, the BBC reported that Apple had 66 road-registered driverless cars, with 111 drivers registered to operate those cars.[7] In 2020, it was believed that Apple was still working on self-driving related hardware, software and service as a potential product, instead of actual Apple-branded cars.[8] In December 2020, Reuters reported that Apple was planning on a possible launch date of 2024,[9] but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed it would not be launched before 2025 and might not be launched until 2028 or later.[10]
In February 2024, Apple executives canceled their plans to release the autonomous electric vehicle, instead shifting resources on the project to the company's generative artificial intelligence efforts.[11][12] The project had reportedly cost the company over $1 billion per year, with other parts of Apple collaborating and costing hundreds of millions of dollars in additional spend. Additionally, over 600 employees were laid off due to the cancellation of the project.[13]
chubot
Also, I think Hacker News mostly believed the hype about self-driving cars, with relatively little pushback. Many people were influenced by what the CEOs/investors said, and of course the prospect of jobs and "cool tech"
e.g. in 2018, over 7 years ago, I was simply pointing out that people like Chris Urmson (who had WORKED ON self-driving for decades) and Bill Gurley said self-driving would take 25+ years to deploy (which seems totally accurate now)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16353541
And I got significant pushback
Actually I remember some in-person conversations with MUCH MORE push back than that, including from some close friends.
They believed things because they were told by the media it would happen
People told me in 2018 that their 16 year old would not need to learn how to drive, etc. (In 2025, self-driving is not available in even ONE of their end points for a trip, let alone two end points)
Likewise, at least some people are convinced now that "coding as a job is going away" -- some people are even deathly depressed about it
rozab
I recently watched Not Just Bikes' video on the disastrous future side effects of self-driving cars[0]. Of course it made me think about the massive PR push that made us think they were around the corner, but also about the manufactured consent for these technologies in the first place. Right now this kind of discussion is hitting the mainstream with the 'clanker'[1] backlash. I think it's really obvious to a lot of people that the AI push is not organic and is not based around consumer needs, and this manipulation is making people genuinely angry[2] (ok jreg is a performance artist, but just because something is performative doesn't mean it's not real).
[0]: https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=7yI3eKkirJdTWPwR [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker [2]: https://youtu.be/RpRRejhgtVI?si=aZUVcsY8VyR_jbBA
bee_rider
Wonder how far along we’d be on the path to self driving without any hype cycles…
I suspect stuff like lane following assist and adaptive cruise control
1) will ultimately provide the path to self driving eventually
2) wasn’t particularly helped by the hype cycle
1 is impossible to say at his point, for 2 I guess somebody who works in the field can come along and correct me.
jibe
GM has 6 month attention span, abandoning self driving is suicidal short term thinking.
Waymo has been slow and steady, and has built something pretty great.
AlotOfReading
In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It seems like the whole thing was cancelled in 2023, written off, and the CEO was let go
How much profit is Waymo making now? I'm pretty sure it's $0.
Rover222
Not really your main point, but Tesla self driving is quite incredible, despite what internet clickbait says. They have a clear path to full autonomy with vision-only systems.
But yeah, certainly 5-7 years behind the initial schedule. Which I guess was more of your point.
bwfan123
I would say the same of the following:
1) crypto: raise funding, buy crypto as collateral, raise more funding with said collateral, rinse and repeat.
2) gpu datacenters: raise funding, buy gpus as collateral, raise more funding, buy more gpus, rinse and repeat.
3) zero day options: average folks want a daily lottery thrill. rinse and repeat.
All of the above are fed by fomo and to some extent hype, and ripe for a reckoning.
bookofjoe
FWIW when I lived in Japan in 1968-69 it was 360 JPY to the dollar. I felt like a millionaire!
jsheard
GitHub isn't even the worst example of this at Microsoft, they didn't just force AI on Office users but also tricked them into paying extra for it. They unilaterally switched all personal and family accounts over to AI-enabled plans that were 30-40% more expensive, and hid the option to revert back to the old plan such that it's only offered as a last resort if you try to cancel your subscription.
alphazard
Organizations, once they reach a certain size, are usually not self consistent. Organizations are made up of people, and each person wants different things and has different incentives. It takes an excellent leader to make an organization appear consistent, it's not the default at all.
Marketers are trying to keep their jobs, sales people are trying to keep their jobs, etc.
mhh__
I bet this was true of computers back in the day too. The processes that are native to computers are magical but adding computers to the old is actually quite bad e.g. paperwork is better done on paper
skydhash
You bet wrong. Computers were pricey enough that if you want one, you have to really need it to justify the price. It was not forced on any business.
mhh__
How long ago? I was born after the pedants Millenium so I'm expecting my definition of back in the day is different to yours
I think my time frame is firmly after the invention of excel but before the web was it's own thing
warmedcookie
Yep, electronics in general too. People today complain about GPU prices, but that was the norm for everything electronic related.
brabel
What are you talking about?? There was lots of resistance to computers at office jobs. Even through the 90s lots of people were still avoiding moving away from the old way and companies had to spend lots of money on training because without that people quickly reverted back to their old ways! I remember that and was taught how to provide such training and how to convince people to adopt new tech! It’s always been a challenge.
cmiles74
The less I know about a thing the more useful an LLM seems to be. I’m working with a new-to-me enterprise code base, the LLM helps me find related (and duplicate) code. Even here it’s usefulness has an expiration date, eventually I’ll know where stuff lives and I’ll use it less and less. Life experience tells me I’m not unique and I suspect the constant cram-AI-into-the-thing is because the vendors are hoping, eventually, they’ll find a use-case for LLMs that sticks.
immibis
Yes, they've legitimately good at a few things (e.g. very fuzzy search), but that doesn't justify the amount of investment.
goku12
The environmental damage is even worse than the investment. Those who have the money to invest in it usually care only about the returns and not the environment.
giancarlostoro
This is the correct way. Use the LLM dont let it become the only way you work.
pylua
Is it really that weird that a company would speak from both sides of their mouth ? That is essentially what corporate speak is. That should be the assumed default when a major company says anything.
garyfirestorm
I would like to point out that in certain scenarios people are not very smart. For eg. Many car enthusiasts who care about speed and 0-60 will still look down on EVs despite EVs being ridiculously fast and cheap to attain those metrics. 40k EV is faster than 150k Porsche. But these guys will never adopt it.
vluft
that's not mostly what car enthusiasts care about, especially somebody buying a 150k porsche; they care about handling and road feel and a fat pig of an EV will never match a lighter car (well set up) on that; you can't beat physics when you're slinging that much weight; even set up as well as can be, a 5000lb taycan doesn't come close to the handling feel of a 3250lb 911.
hedora
A BMW i3 weighs about 3000 lbs. They’re mostly fiberglass and have a small battery. The center of gravity is probably comparable to the 911 even though it’s tall and goofy looking (all the weight is in the battery, under the seats).
The tire geometry causes a bit of oversteering, but they generally corner well, etc.
zzzeek
can someone explain to me if this is real? I run many high profile OSS projects that are all hosted on Github. I've yet to see any issues or PRs generated by AI, when PRs come in, I've never seen an AI code review pop in. I've seen maybe one or two people trying to answer discussion questions where they obviously used an LLM but that wasn't copilot, it was just individual people trying to be clever. Why am I not seeing this happen on my repos?
it's just the copilot popups that are hardcoded in vscode right now despite no extension being installed, that are very annoying and I'd like those to go away.
Leynos
I suspect it's either fantasy or fabrication.
Y_Y
How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?
politelemon
It wasn't critical at that time.
But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us.
It's easy to knee jerk on HN but let's try to do better than this.
gchamonlive
When Microsoft bought GH it was already the most popular forge by far, which is why it was bought in the first place.
> But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us.
That's blaming the victim. The vast majority of the opensource projects were hosted on GH since before Microsoft's acquisition. I remember back in 2018 when my team made the decision to move from bitbucket to GitHub, the main consideration was the platform quality but also the community we were getting access to.
topaz0
Not me.
layer8
GitHub isn’t critical infrastructure, it’s only real USP is network effects.
transcriptase
If outages make headlines and stop whole companies in their tracks worldwide, that’s critical infrastructure, not just network effects.
netsharc
Gotta love the genius of creating a single point of failure out of a distributed (version control) system...
_Algernon_
Git is designed so that you always have the full code you're working on copied to your local machine. Github being down for a short time from time to time should be only a minor inconvenience.
ReptileMan
>and stop whole companies in their tracks worldwide
This is a sign that their CTOs should be replaced. Not that github is critical.
Disposal8433
> If outages [...] stop whole companies in their tracks
They should fucking learn how to code because no one in their right mind would depend on such an external service that can be easily replaced by cloning repos locally or using proxies like Artifactory. Even worse when you know that Microsoft is behind it.
Yes, most companies don't have good practices and suck at maintaining a basic infrastructure, but it doesn't mean GitHub is the center of the internet. It's only a stupid git server with PRs.
Spooky23
How on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time?
diggan
They used Emojis and printed "Microsoft <3 Open Source" on posters for conferences, so clearly they really had changed...
reaperducer
How on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time?
There's a whole generation on HN who came up after Microsoft's worst phase, and have spent the last five years defending MS on this very forum.
They're convinced that any bad thing Microsoft does is a "boomer" grudge, and will defend MS to the end.
I hope I'm never so weak-minded that I tie my identity and allegiance to a trillion-dollar company. Or any company that I haven't founded, for that matter.
Spooky23
End of the day, PR works. Even in peak “friendly” Microsoft, they were hard nosed and noxious to negotiate with.
andrewinardeer
Was GitHub really critical at time of purchase? Or has Microsoft turned it into critical infrastructure?
daemin
Even though Git is decentralised, people like having a simple client-server model for version control. So with Github being the most funded free Git hosting service it grew to being the biggest. They also built out the extra services on top of git hosting, the issue tracker, CI/CD, discussion board, integrated wiki, github-pages, etc.
I would say all of those things were present before the acquisition, enough that Microsoft itself started to use the site for its own open source code hosting.
rs186
If you travel back to 2018 and ask random software engineers "are git and github developed and owned by the same company", a fair number of them would say yes, just like today.
diggan
> Was GitHub really critical at time of purchase?
Do you think they would have bought it otherwise? Same for NPM, they got bought for huge sums of money because they were "critical" already.
andrewinardeer
I am of the opinion that it wasn't critical infra, but it was at least unique infra. Similar to LinkedIn, which MS acquired. It wasn't that LI was critical it was because it was unique.
And since the acquisition, they have built it out to be critical. Similar to what META did with Instagram. Instagram wasn't critical when META purchased it, but now it is the cornerstone of any business's online presence as it has been built out.
oytis
It was the leading git storage at the time of acquisition, for many people synonymous with git itself
airstrike
There is no law against that, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting.
And git lives on regardless of GitHub
latexr
> There is no law against that
Regulators can (and do) stop purchases which can be considered harmful to consumers. Just look at the Adobe/Figma deal.
bapak
If GitHub were to close tomorrow, you'd lose out on the social part temporarily, but there are effectively dozens of providers and solutions that could replace it.
The same could not be said for Figma, where if lost, you'd end up looking at the company that tried to buy it. That's what those laws are for.
airstrike
No, Adobe/Figma was stopped because it would severely reduce competition in a market where there are already very few relevant players. That's all they can block.
dboreham
[flagged]
mvdtnz
"Critical"? "Infrastructure"? What do you think Github is?
chamomeal
Critical piece of tech infrastructure. Which is absolutely is.
When GitHub goes down, the company I work at is pretty much kneecapped for the duration of the outage. If you’re in the middle of a PR, waiting for GitHub actions, doing work in a codespace, or just need to pull/fetch/push changes before you can work, you’re just stuck!
1over137
Wow. Why would your company do that? It's easy to self-host gitlab for example.
zbentley
Among other things, a CDN. If it were to take a sustained outage, lots of important online systems would stop working shortly thereafter. And I’m not talking about developer tools; bigger sites/apps than you think are reliant on GH being up. Stupid to do that, sure, but widespread.
gitaarik
They were allowed to buy it because GitHub is not licensed with an FOSS licence. How on earth did we all settle on such a propietary piece of tech infrastructure? No wonder Microsoft bought it.
9cb14c1ec0
Microsoft either owns or hosts on Azure a lot of critical pieces of tech infrastructure apart from just Github.
djoldman
> The second most popular discussion – where popularity is measured in upvotes – is a bug report that seeks a fix for the inability of users to disable Copilot code reviews.
From the discussion:
> Allow us to block Copilot-generated issues (and PRs) from our own repositories
> ... This says to me that github will soon start allowing github users to submit issues which they did not write themselves and were machine-generated. I would consider these issues/PRs to be both a waste of my time and a violation of my projects' code of conduct¹.
> Note: Because it appears that both issues and PRs written this way are posted by the "copilot" bot, a straightforward way to implement this would be if users could simply block the "copilot" bot. In my testing, it appears that you have special-cased "copilot" so that it is exempt from the block feature.
How does one see that a user, e.g. "chickenpants" submitted an issue or PR that was generated by "Copilot"? Isn't there only one creator?
rdm_blackhole
I am not sure if it's just me but the Github UI has become incredibly slow.
On bigger PRs, I regularly have diffs that take seconds to load. The actions also started hanging a lot more often and will run for 30 minutes stuck in some kind of loop unless they time out or I cancel them manually. This did not use to happen before or least not as frequently as now.
Finally when I try to cancel the hung actions, the cancel button never gets disabled after I click it and it is possible to click it multiple times without any effect. Once clicked, surely it shouldn't be possible to click it again unless the API calls failed.
Clearly there is a quality decrease happening here.
rsynnott
> I am not sure if it's just me but the Github UI has become incredibly slow.
Making things work properly is terribly passé in this brave new world of magic nonsense-generating robots.
You see this with Google Docs, too; after about a decade of stagnation, Google _finally_ started adding a few features (basic Markdown support, say, better comments, a few other bits and pieces) around 2022... And it finally got a bit less slow. But now that seems to have come to a shuddering halt; once more Docs stagnates, but it has about a hundred Gemini buttons now! It also feels like it's getting slower and buggier again.
crote
I'm getting quite sick of how it is forced on you. It's not just yet-another useful feature, they are shoveling it into everything, and giving it the most prominent place possible.
I don't want AI getting in the way on Github. I don't want an unremovable AI button in my Office 365 mail client. I don't want to get nagging AI popups every. single. time. I open the GCP console.
A year or two I was ambivalent about AI, and willing to give it a try. These days? I actively hate it. Like all nagging ads: if you have to force it on me this badly, how can it be anything but complete garbage?
bflesch
It's mostly about making it easy for users to opt in so they can steal the data. The theoretical AI benefits only appear once the data is stolen (pinky promise).
anonymars
"Press alt-i to draft a message"
Fuck off and leave me alone you distracting piece of shit
tech234a
I found the Copilot-generated commit message suggestions distracting when editing files from the web, so I made a uBlock Origin filter to block this feature:
||api.individual.githubcopilot.com/agents/github-commit-message-generation$xhr,domain=github.comGet the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
I read this article and then looked at my Github and a few other projects and found no issues created by Copilot. As someone else has said they need to be triggered manually, so therefore it's the same sort of problem as with the Curl project bug bounty, where people would be spamming with automatically LLM generated fictional problems. In that case because there's a potential for money to be made, and in the Github copilot case because I guess they're trying to contribute to open source for whatever reason.
As far as Visual Studio Code goes, I've not really used it much but it makes sense since it's Microsoft's free editor, so you will be a product and you will be marketed to. I do use Visual Studio though, and it does show Copilot in the UI by default, but there is an option to "hide Copilot" from the UI which does what is advertised. I will probably remove my important projects from Github though, but mainly so they are not used for LLM training than anything else.