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HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'
- ajdude 5mo ago[Dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579
- et-al 5mo agoYeah, I don't know how this dupe is making it to the front page when the first-party blog post with mitchellh posting in the thread is right there.
- eightys3v3n 5mo agoIn my case it's because the title on this post is more interesting.
- flossly 5mo agoIs it me, or did get issues get a lot worse with the transfer to MSFT?
- strictnein 5mo agoThe purchase wasn't a year ago, it was 8 years ago. In that time how much has it grown? 10x? 100x? More?
- gwbas1c 5mo agoIt's probably due to a more recent change, IE, focusing on features over stability. Or, it could be that there was some turnover in ops and someone who was a hawk about stability isn't there. If I were to bet, there's probably a product manager or other leader who's just gung-ho on new features and loosing track of who their customers are and what their needs are.
- hylaride 5mo agoIMO, it's probably a combination of factors. I get the feeling GitHub has no clear leadership by anybody who actually USES it. The priorities internally were almost certainly "get onto azure, shove copilot/AI down everybody's throat, and other generic "product driven" initiatives. The user-hostile move to react was done in a way that broke browser back-button functionality, especially in Pull Requests. They don't/didn't care because what are you going to do? On one hand, the free users shouldn't complain too much, though I get their anger. But the place I work is an enterprise paying customer and this is bullshit.
- sebastiansm7 5mo agoI think is more related to vibe coding
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoAgreed. In general the amount and variety of bugs introduced since everyone started vibing is worrying. It is probably a national security concern but I guess so is the economy tanking due to failed AI investments. Guess we will see
- DanielHB 5mo agoDefinitely not, I remember some 4 years ago some random bug in a github-supported github-action and a comment in an issue saying: "I heard the team responsible for this action was laid off, don't expect a fix". This was shortly after the microsoft acquisition. But the vibe coding BS probably made it 10 times worse.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago> But the vibe coding BS probably made it 10 times worse. Yup, keep seeing this in various companies. Teams that were effective and did solid engineering now are more effective and does even better engineering. Teams that were effectively already just "boilerplate monkies" now produce a lot more code than before, but the quality is the same so effectively they're worse at contributing now than before, and take more shortcuts, not less. From my point of view, agents are amplifiers, so if you usually build spaghetti projects, agents just help you do that faster, not avoid the spaghetti altogether. If you usually build well-designed stuff, they can help you put that together faster.
- strictnein 5mo ago> I remember some 4 years ago ... This was shortly after the microsoft acquisition. The acquisition was 8 years ago.
- cjbgkagh 5mo agoThey started with a hands off approach and then went hands on, I’m not sure but that ‘hands on’ timing is likely to happen shortly after the usual acquisition vesting period of 3 years when the old guard starts to leave.
- hkt 5mo agoIt is absolutely not just you
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5mo agoIs it just me, or [thing that has been repeated a billion times every day on this and every other website]
- zthrowaway 5mo agoIt certainly seems like low effort engagement farming.
- Tade0 5mo agoEven after decades, the policy is the same: Embrace, extend, and extinguish.
- glenngillen 5mo agoWhich was a policy that increased their market dominance for their existing dominate products. What exactly are they extinguishing GitHub to the benefit of? Azure Repos?
- cjbgkagh 5mo agoPerhaps they can’t help themselves out of habit, it is their nature. The original red dog team that started azure is long gone and the general success of the cloud papers over all levels of incompetence so that the incompetence is now entrenched and unable to do better. Cloud service providers have this unfortunate property where poor designs will make more money which makes it hard to maintain a culture of excellence. I tried to push a design change that would result in a 10x throughput for a certain product and was told that a 90% drop in usage is the last thing they want. I self host my own stuff with GitLab, so far not a single unplanned outage in 6 years. Perhaps a Roman decimation is in order, whenever GitHub experiences an outage fire one GitHub employee at random. That should help get interests in line and allow for cross org cooperation. With 150 outages per year and a staff of 6,000 that amounts to 2.5% per year if no improvements are made.
- sumtechguy 5mo agoThat can happen many times during a buyout. Some company buys a thing. The problem then is ownership of the thing. Who in the new company is going to own the 'make sure it stays good' problem. Sometimes with a buy out the people who were doing that may even stay at the company. But it is a matter of motivation. MS has a real serious problem. You can see the gaps where they have glued together at least 10 companies together and called it microsoft. They have a huge reputational risk issue. Where something breaking in the xbox div can have a negative impact on the tools division. Also the other way around. They lack focus on many items. They have needed a 'service pack 2' stop the presses moment and fix this mount everest of tech debt.
- itomato 5mo agoYes, of course, but also more recently under the new CoreAI unit: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-ai-coding-rivals-overhauling-github-2025-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-ai-coding-rivals-o...
- WestCoader 5mo agoNothing is pissing me off more than GitHub's stability going down the tubes RIGHT as work is migrating everything, and I mean everything, from CircleCI to GH. The wildest thing is that Azure Repos/Pipelines was better than this. Their one caveat is also that they are still migrating it to Azure infra, so it's possible that's still in a one foot in one foot out kinda scenario, from what I've heard. But, this isn't inspiring confidence.
- gonzo41 5mo agoMee too. We just did a very similar migration at work it's incredibly frustrating, I've got all my CI ported over and now this. MSFT should just create slophub.com they'd make money im sure.
- Mashimo 5mo agoHonest question, why are companies interested in hosting on github? As a private person I use it too as a free hoster, but from work I mainly know self hosted instances of jenkins and TeamCity.
- ellisv 5mo agoMost developers have experience using GitHub. The UI and concepts are familiar. The friction for adopting features like Actions is relatively low.
- not_ai 5mo agoAt one point it was also used as signaling that a company was “modern.”
- Mashimo 5mo ago> The UI and concepts are familiar. I guess, but it's not like you can't learn how to create a pullrequest on bitbucket or how to create an issue on jira as well within a work day? That seems like the smallest thing when switching to a new company. > The friction for adopting features like Actions is relatively low. Yeah, I know almost nothing about the CI integration and actions when it comes to Github. Will look into it. Thank you.
- thiago_fm 5mo agoIt isn't surprising at all, Microsoft is doing a PE firm playbook with what they buy. You don't need to look much far, let's think about its biggest acquisition to date, Blizzard. Blizzcon canceled. All of its IP barely got any love. See what players think about the latest World of Warcraft patch. It's absolutely shit and broken. People say they fired the entire QA department since a few years back and since then the quality has just gone down. They buy those businesses because they have nothing to do with that free cash flow, and for accounting reasons it makes sense to have them. They didn't buy those businesses to develop it further and make it worth more. Github will just become ever more irrelevant. The key issue is that the US governments let those huge monopolies exist, and then use their money to buy other businesses and enshiftify them. Unless that changes in the US, this will continue happening.
- surgical_fire 5mo agoThe thing is that they didn't buy Blizzard, they bought Activision. They were interested in CoD numbers. I think Diablo Immortal was likely the biggest success Blizz provided there
- miningape 5mo ago> See what players think about the latest World of Warcraft patch. It's absolutely shit and broken Crazy to me that the loot tables are still broken for some players/characters, they've tried to fix it several times now, and it's still not working - Since (some) endgame gear can only be obtained this way they've effectively soft locked those players/character out of the endgame. Context: Some players are always receiving the same drops i.e. a belt. Rather than a varied loot table that gives them a chance to get items they need.
- mrguyorama 5mo agoOh good, they managed to break MMO functionality that has worked for 30 years.
- zackangelo 5mo agoI don’t think this is true across Blizzard. Overwatch is the best it’s ever been.
- sikozu 5mo agoWith Ghostty being the latest project to leave GitHub, it does make me wonder who will leave next. I don't expect everybody and their nan to leave GitHub by next wednesday and spin up their own Forgejo server, but I do think GitHub should be worried that people are finally looking to move away from them.
- napolux 5mo agodo we have already an HN user creating "who-left-gh.net"? (domain is free)
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo agoCreated a repository to track all the latest github projects (ironically, my project is on github xD) https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/who-left-gh/ https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/who-left-gh/ Currently I know 3 projects, Ghostty, Bookstack-app, Hardenedbsd who have seemed to move away from Github from my understanding.
- mi_lk 5mo agoarguably Zig started the trend just about the time GH really gone shit (this year)
- jefftime 5mo agoThe Zig project has also left GitHub relatively recently https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/ https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo agoThanks to both you and mi_lk, I have added zig to the list.
- mettamage 5mo agoI'm a bit out of the loop, why are people moving away from Github?
- bwb 5mo agoIs Gitlab doing better at this point? Or where do they stand?
- throwawaypath 5mo agoGitLab has been doing better than GitHub for a decade or more.
- davidee 5mo agoTLDR; don't use their SaaS offering, but probably better, yes, though who knows for how long. I don't use their SaaS offering, but I've been using the self-hosted versions (mostly in CE flavours, but occasionally paid) since the days of the weird black and white fox, when gitlab looked very bootstrap-y. (The logo in question for the curious, but you can't unsee it: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Gitlab_logo.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Gitlab_l... ) Anyway, since LLMs for coding became a thing, coupled with the realities of running a business post-IPO, it's been a slow-ish downward trend for the self-hoster, as their offering gets more and more bloat that's likely easier to manage at scale for Gitlab, but stands in stark contrast to what it once was. Little things are pilling up; components left for dead (we now have both TODO - which is an abysmal mess, and "assigned work items" - WHY?!), issue boards that remain messy, advertisements creeping into the CE version, increasingly wild hardware requirements... and some recent changes to their documentation that strike me as a dark pattern; very much a recognition that either you're an enterprise running your own paid GitLab, with some kind of support, or you're a SaaS user and don't GAF about the ops docs. The transition to websockets was annoying. Mostly because it kinda-doesn't work and there's no decent polling fallback, which results in time wasted hitting refresh, in 2026, when everything worked fine from 201x-2025. I've kept my eye out for alternatives, but Gitlab's CI/CD, and the self hosted runners, is still my preferred flavour hands down and continues to be the reason I stick around. Overall, it's a much slower decline, but like all stock-market-centric companies, you can feel the writing on the wall. Nevertheless, we're in the middle of a Gitlab migration from one cloud provider to anther because we still haven't found something better. :/
- Havoc 5mo agoThe selfhosted version has been getting heavier and heavier. Reluctant to call it bloat because it does seem to be features that conceivable someone needs but idk about their direction of travel
- redwood 5mo agoLet's be honest there's an order of magnitude or more higher throughput volume of PR jitter and new repo bloat which makes this look like a viral digital native at scale.. couple that with being owned by one of the most scale immature companies on the planet ... of course it's a problem. Get these folks off Azure and Cosmos DB (or whatever MSFT forces them to use) to something real and maybe you'd have a shot
- erelong 5mo agoso where should people move to instead
- ngalaiko 5mo agotangled, forgejo, radicle, sourcehut - to name a few
- hdgvhicv 5mo agoDifferent places. Stop centralising the web. Embrace diversity.
- sph 5mo agoAs long as it's protected by Cloudflare, that is.
- geerlingguy 5mo agoThis would be best, though it's a big ask, when everyone has gone from self hosting plus a sprinkling of cloud services, to only cloud services and no remembrance of how to self host. I used to run a git server for all my main projects, and mirrored public ones on GitHub. Then the convenience of GitHub lured me in, to the point I shut down my private git server 5 years ago. Now I kinda regret that decision.
- deadbabe 5mo agoI feel like I’m out of the loop, or maybe I’m just not a super GitHub power user, but GitHub does pretty much what I expect and I haven’t had issues with it. All my git commands for GitHub just work and PRs and code reviews are the same as it’s always been. Can someone explain what exactly is so bad now that leaving it entirely to use some new platform, even spinning up your own servers, is a reasonable alternative?
- baq 5mo agosomething reliably breaks 7 am PST (sometimes earlier) if you're using anything more than the git command line and sometimes (not too often, true) even the git protocol breaks.
- sleepybrett 5mo agobut only on days that end in y.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago> and PRs and code reviews are the same as it’s always been When they changed the PR view to not display all the changes at once, was the moment I said "I really need to find something else", not only is the platform very unreliable (at least from Spain), but most product changes they do are making the platform less efficient for me as a developer to use. > Can someone explain what exactly is so bad now that leaving it entirely to use some new platform, even spinning up your own servers, is a reasonable alternative? It always was, but network-effect of GitHub been large. But seemingly not infinite, at one point people start favoring "Being able to access platform" over "people can star my repository" it seems.
- giwook 5mo agoTheir stability and reliability has deteriorated significantly. So much so that they stopped posting uptime metrics for a while on their status page and an independent 3rd party created a website just for this: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ (not my website) According to that website, which unsurprisingly reports a lower number than what Github themselves claim, Github uptime is down to ~86%. And if you work in the space, you know how terrible that is, but even more so for such a critical piece of infrastructure.
- dzonga 5mo agoYou gotta admire journalists. Such a one punch sentence that distills the message with a little bit of dramatic flair. got damn, anyone got recommendations on how to write like a journalist ?
- giwook 5mo agoHave you tried asking an LLM?
- giwook 5mo agoLol why is this tongue-in-cheek statement being downvoted
- sph 5mo agoTake a sentence for a title, replace one of the verbs with SLAM, LAMBAST and CLAPS BACK, you're hired. The rest of the article can be AI generated, don't fret about it.
- sevenzero 5mo agoTitles can be genrated as well, just tell the LLM whether your readers love drama and witch hunts or are pseudo intellectuals. It'll come up with the correct framing.
- michaelcampbell 5mo agoDon't forget the "..., and no one/nothing is <verb>ing" clause.
- lysace 5mo agoWriting titles for e.g. Reddit posts teaches you the same things. It’s an intellectual and creative exercise that I kind of enjoy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- nacozarina 5mo agoeveryone knew M$ would ruin github the fake surprise is so fake
- drcongo 5mo agoI haven't seen anyone faking surprise, or even genuinely surprised, what are you referring to?
- hirako2000 5mo agoM$ bought GH almost a decad ago. Instability is more due to mainstream traffic, combined (+ AI automation pushes on pointless repos) than some slow motion evil mastermind plot. Hanlon's razor applies.
- JCTheDenthog 5mo agoNo one forced them to migrate GitHub to switch to React. And the atrocious sleep bug in Actions long predates the AI gold rush.
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago[dead]
- bonesss 5mo agoImplying that MS would crater an org like GitHub within a few years is ascribing fundamental incompetence to a provably competent acquirer. Hanlon’s razor is precluded from use if there is contradictory logic. GitHub’s mandated transfer to Azure was on hold for quite a while, Azure needed to be upgraded to handle them. Then the migration started, a multi-year effort, then the LLMs got integrated. If you slap a 2.5 year window onto those phases you end up around a decade. That’s Enterprise timing, not slow motion. And, critically, this is not some new emergent phenomenon today. Orgs are pulling the plug noticeably now because of massive service failures. The reputational damage has been growing over time. Management changed, dumbish things happened, and consequences are rolling out. Even MS didn’t push the direct changes causing the issues (they did), they are responsible for avoiding and alleviating them (they didn’t). Change propagation takes time bound by the medium of transmission.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 5mo ago[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago[dead]
- kartoshechka 5mo agojust like hashicorp, its careers site redirects to IBM site with no filter to find hashicorp positions
- hobofan 5mo agoI do get the link https://www.ibm.com/careers/search?q=hashicorp https://www.ibm.com/careers/search?q=hashicorp which seems to do a decent job of filtering to Hashicorp positions.
- cdrnsf 5mo agoI imagine they'll ruin VS Code and NPM next.
- aussieguy1234 5mo agoAre we watching live the first company that implodes due to Vibe Coding?
- aussieguy1234 5mo agoNot sure why the downvotes. But i'll bet they are now scrambling to re-hire the engineers they replaced with vibe coding AI. Here are a few other examples of AI going badly wrong Replit - CEO Amjad Masad's platform experienced an incident where an AI coding agent deleted a live production database during a code freeze, affecting records of over 1,200 executives and 1,100+ companies. Klarna - Initially touted its AI assistant as doing work equivalent to hundreds of customer service agents, but later had to hire human customer service workers again to balance AI with human support. Air Canada - Learned in court that inaccurate chatbot guidance can become the company's legal responsibility.
- bellowsgulch 5mo agoI’m certain I’m up there in the 1% of users, or close to it, that are writing software daily in terms of consistent prolonged volume of work and work that is actually used by others over the past nearly 20 years based on user activity statistics I’ve collected. I, too, am a fairly, but not immediate early user of GitHub. Despite GitHub’s poor metrics, I am still shipping, because writing software doesn’t require GitHub. Hashimoto’s comments sound disturbed and I hope he finds some peace, but if he wasn’t who he was and you read these comments, you’d think this person had a problem. So, I think he does.
- aprilnya 5mo ago„I don’t use any of GitHub’s non-git features, so if you use them you have a problem”
- joombaga 5mo agoWho are you quoting?
- ulbu 5mo ago"Writing software doesn't require GitHub". Well, if they do not need whatever is specific to github and claim that someone who sorely lacks these features has a mental problem...
- codingdave 5mo agoTo be fair, the author of the post said the same thing. From the other thread on HN, they themselves said: "Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. "
- dspillett 5mo agoThat was paraphrasing, rather than quoting. The post being replied to essentially said “I don't use the features that have been regularly broken in recent times, or where the features I do use [core git] were broken it luckily didn't affect me, so anyone thinking of leaving has a mental problem”. Or to paraphrase the old joke: Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: The sunlight through the windows here is working fine, if you can't see where you are that must be a “you” problem.
- rwmj 5mo ago> “I'm GitHub user 1299, joined Feb 2008,” How do you find out what "github user #" you are?
- d4mi3n 5mo agoIt shows up in API responses when you look up your own user.
- esterly 5mo ago`curl https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USER_HERE https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USER_HERE` then look for the id in the payload. "id": 2851 Or look at the html source of your avatar, https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/2851?v=4 https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/2851?v=4
- Vinnl 5mo agoHuh. Looks like my account is only two months younger. I'm not nearly as emotionally attached to GH though.
- zparky 5mo agogo to a profile and open image in new tab, the URL is /u/# (im # ~4 million!)
- Xiol 5mo agoHuh, I'm in the late 150000's. I was genuinely expecting it to be in the millions.
- daft_pink 5mo agoThe main question is what is the best alternative??
- wombat-man 5mo agoYeah I only use it for hobby or side project stuff, but if I get why they're mad if they expect to rely on it for professional work.
- Aperocky 5mo agoAs place to store code? Just put it on github, it's fine, public facing code can all go there (as a mirror). As place to run test? Build your own infrastructure. It's easier than ever. Why rely on blackboxes to do that?
- hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago> As place to run test? Build your own infrastructure. It's easier than ever. Why rely on blackboxes to do that? I'm not saying this is horrible advice, but I think it conveniently ignores some major reasons people prefer cloud infrastructure in the first place. Building your own infrastructure is the (relatively) easy part. Maintaining it, ensuring everything is patched, passing compliance audits, dealing with your own outages (I find it a bit ironic when everyone complains about cloud downtime, as if self hosted infrastructure has 99.999% uptime) is the expensive part. I'm not saying it's that hard to do, but once you get to a certain size it requires dedicated staff to manage, which is expensive. In fact, if GitHub Actions were more reliable, I would hardly see any reason at all to host your own test infrastructure for most companies. The only reason hosting your own is more attractive is because GH Actions has such poor uptime.
- u_fucking_dork 5mo agoGitHub Enterprise if you’re a business
- ticulatedspline 5mo agoWe use self-hosted GitLab. No major complaints, even on the free version.
- peterpanhead 5mo agoHe can leave. Why do we have to care about what he says or does?
- jmorenoamor 5mo agoNow I understand why my ArgoCD randomly shows sync problems saying it cannot access GitHub
- exabrial 5mo agoGitLab isn't much better. The releases ignore serious bugs, but they have unlimited budget to make stupid UI tweaks that offer zero real world improvement.
- bayindirh 5mo agoWorse, self-hosted version broke one of the updates by botching a migration and giving no error about it. Installation broke in mysterious and subtle ways, causing us to scratch heads for days. The next update warned us about the problem, so we ran the repair commands to put things in order again. This is a very small server with ~10 users and ~50 repos at most.
- strenholme 5mo agoIndeed. I was completely turned off my GitLab when I was updating my SSH keys across multiple accounts: GitHub, Bitbucket, Codeberg, etc. GitLab was really buggy; it is impossible to update the SSH key in GitLab using Firefox, and no obviously indications it was a GitLab Firefox compatibility bug. Took me nearly an hour to think to try and use Chrome to upload the new SSH key. Ugh. I won’t touch GitLab again after that experience.
- rurp 5mo agoIt's such a shame, I absolutely loved GitLab when I first started using it ~8-9 years ago. Switching to company on GitHub a few years later felt like a huge regression. GitLab had all sorts of little UX niceties and, while there were some rough edges, overall it seemed well thought through. Since then though, holy cow have things gotten worse. The UX has changed more times than I can count and seems to get worse every time. Rough edges never get fixed, but new ones get introduced all the time. It's hard to think of anything useful that has been added or improved in recent years. It's such a shame. GitHub is its own mess and I really wish GitLab had made itself a clear superior alternative and eaten their lunch.
- debarshri 5mo agoAs we speak, there is github api issues going on.
- mrbluecoat 5mo agoDuplicate. 904 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579
- shevy-java 5mo agoObjectively we can not say "this is the beginning of the end of GitHub". Many people use GitHub daily still. But I think this right now is kind of a period of where GitHub is sliding into a bigger crisis. I am noticing this, among other things (including reddit and Hackernews in the last ~4 weeks becoming more and more critical of Microslop, 'xcuse me, Microsoft, which controls GitHub of course) when I look at the recent blog entries made by GitHub staff - the three latest being: 27th April 2026: Starting June 1, your Copilot usage will consume GitHub AI Credits. 28th April 2026: An update on GitHub availability 28th April 2026:Securing the git push pipeline bla bla bla critical remote code vulnerability bla bla bla In particular the GitHub availability is interesting. When I read it, it almost sounded like a plea to "believe in us still, guys!!!". If you then read what the ghostty author wrote, something between the blog post from GitHub, and the outside world, no longer matches. GitHub is like on the titanic, they see the iceberg part above water and say "nothing to see here, this ship is invincible" (aka AI is invincible). Meanwhile everyone else already jumps off the ship ...