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Yeah, 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 ro

Yeah, 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.

bdangubic 5mo ago
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
- idiotsecant 5mo ago
  Yes, the terrible sin of ... Hosting code where people can find it
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - icase 5mo ago
    hosting code where people can find it is the reason LLMs can write code, so we kind of screwed ourselves there…
  - exe34 5mo ago
    How did people do it before github? Did everyone write everything with peek and poke?
    - doubled112 5mo ago
      Sourceforge
    - kuboble 5mo ago
      Private people would keep their code locally and share the snapshot of the code using any file sharing or hosting option available. Companies had been hosting their own CVS or later svn servers.
    - lelanthran 5mo ago
      > How did people do it before github? Did everyone write everything with peek and poke? I've been sharing GPL projects since 1999. We didn't need peek and poke (Both of which I have also used further in history...), but we managed nevertheless. Prior to github I shared software on sourceforge (and others). Prior to that I published stuff on Freshmeat. Prior to that I downloaded games others shared (not open source) on Happy Puppy. Prior to that I used usenet to find and download games, shareware, etc. Prior to that I used ftp to (IIRC) ftp.sunsite.edu, ftp.nic.fi, and others. Prior to that I got news of new releases using Gopher. Finally, prior to that, I actuallyy did use peek and poke to write software :-/ If github went away, and centralised repos went away, we'd still have something...
    - icase 5mo ago
      is this a serious question
      - exe34 5mo ago
        No, it was rhetorical. I remember downloading software from sourceforge, distro servers and getting drivers from random people's websites that needed to be compiled.
  - xigoi 5mo ago
    I can’t remember the last time I looked for a project specifically on GitHub. I always come there via a link from another site.
majormajor 5mo ago
> 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.
ako 5mo ago
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.
- chowells 5mo ago
  Because it's centralized. Your project pays the price for every unrelated project that's getting overloaded.
  - ako 5mo ago
    I'm sure the underlying infra is not a single server, so this is mostly a period where they have to adapt to higher loads due to AI becoming actually useable in the last 8 months. It's basically proof how well AI works these days. Give it a few months so they can scale and it'll get better. Remember Twitter fail whale? Growth pains that can and will be solved.
    - georgemcbay 5mo ago
      > It's basically proof how well AI works these days. Give it a few months so they can scale and it'll get better. Remember Twitter fail whale? Growth pains that can and will be solved. GitHub's problems can technically be solved, but that doesn't mean they can be solved in a way where the economics still work out. If AI use is 10x-ing the amount of infrastructure costs for GitHub but not 10x-ing the amount of money Microsoft brings in from GitHub then there is certainly no guarantee they will bother to solve these issues adequately. And I'd be shocked if the revenue side of things isn't lagging way behind the extra usage post-AI-era, both because a lot of the new use is probably on the GitHub free tier, and because even on the paid tier most usage (other than CI/Actions, AFAIK) are on a fixed subscription cost per user regardless of how much you are slamming their servers and it is unclear how much they can raise that price without current enterprise users fleeing. Twitter had a clearer goal that aligned with the financials... support more people stably, show more ads. Things are less clear with GitHub's business model where the free tier is a loss leader for the paid tier but the expansion in usage is likely to balloon the free tier usage at a far faster rate than the paid tier usage. Also (and this part is admittedly far more speculative) if AI labs are to be believed this is still early days for AI usage and we'll still see massive usage growth over the next few years. If GitHub is already having existential trouble at the beginning of the curve, what hope do they have to scale up with their current business model if AI usage actually does ramp up exponentially?
kyrra 5mo ago
Saas code hosting seems to be the problem here. If companies self hosted, they could deal with the scaling problems themselves.
- lelanthran 5mo ago
  > Saas code hosting seems to be the problem here. If companies self hosted, they could deal with the scaling problems themselves. If all companies did this, there'd be no free tier on Github. You get the free tier because the SaaS customers are subsidising the free tier.
watwut 5mo ago
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.
logicchains 5mo ago
>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.
einsteinx2 5mo ago
> 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?
- aliasxneo 5mo ago
  It doesn't. It just means if they were having problems before, they've now been made significantly worse by AI (on the free tier). All I'm saying is that the problem is bigger than, "Microsoft sucks."
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
phpnode 5mo ago
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).

bdangubic 5mo ago

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

idiotsecant 5mo ago
Yes, the terrible sin of ... Hosting code where people can find it
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- icase 5mo ago
  hosting code where people can find it is the reason LLMs can write code, so we kind of screwed ourselves there…
- exe34 5mo ago
  How did people do it before github? Did everyone write everything with peek and poke?
  - doubled112 5mo ago
    Sourceforge
  - kuboble 5mo ago
    Private people would keep their code locally and share the snapshot of the code using any file sharing or hosting option available. Companies had been hosting their own CVS or later svn servers.
  - lelanthran 5mo ago
    > How did people do it before github? Did everyone write everything with peek and poke? I've been sharing GPL projects since 1999. We didn't need peek and poke (Both of which I have also used further in history...), but we managed nevertheless. Prior to github I shared software on sourceforge (and others). Prior to that I published stuff on Freshmeat. Prior to that I downloaded games others shared (not open source) on Happy Puppy. Prior to that I used usenet to find and download games, shareware, etc. Prior to that I used ftp to (IIRC) ftp.sunsite.edu, ftp.nic.fi, and others. Prior to that I got news of new releases using Gopher. Finally, prior to that, I actuallyy did use peek and poke to write software :-/ If github went away, and centralised repos went away, we'd still have something...
  - icase 5mo ago
    is this a serious question
    - exe34 5mo ago
      No, it was rhetorical. I remember downloading software from sourceforge, distro servers and getting drivers from random people's websites that needed to be compiled.
- xigoi 5mo ago
  I can’t remember the last time I looked for a project specifically on GitHub. I always come there via a link from another site.

majormajor 5mo ago

> 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.

ako 5mo ago

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.

chowells 5mo ago
Because it's centralized. Your project pays the price for every unrelated project that's getting overloaded.
- ako 5mo ago
  I'm sure the underlying infra is not a single server, so this is mostly a period where they have to adapt to higher loads due to AI becoming actually useable in the last 8 months. It's basically proof how well AI works these days. Give it a few months so they can scale and it'll get better. Remember Twitter fail whale? Growth pains that can and will be solved.
  - georgemcbay 5mo ago
    > It's basically proof how well AI works these days. Give it a few months so they can scale and it'll get better. Remember Twitter fail whale? Growth pains that can and will be solved. GitHub's problems can technically be solved, but that doesn't mean they can be solved in a way where the economics still work out. If AI use is 10x-ing the amount of infrastructure costs for GitHub but not 10x-ing the amount of money Microsoft brings in from GitHub then there is certainly no guarantee they will bother to solve these issues adequately. And I'd be shocked if the revenue side of things isn't lagging way behind the extra usage post-AI-era, both because a lot of the new use is probably on the GitHub free tier, and because even on the paid tier most usage (other than CI/Actions, AFAIK) are on a fixed subscription cost per user regardless of how much you are slamming their servers and it is unclear how much they can raise that price without current enterprise users fleeing. Twitter had a clearer goal that aligned with the financials... support more people stably, show more ads. Things are less clear with GitHub's business model where the free tier is a loss leader for the paid tier but the expansion in usage is likely to balloon the free tier usage at a far faster rate than the paid tier usage. Also (and this part is admittedly far more speculative) if AI labs are to be believed this is still early days for AI usage and we'll still see massive usage growth over the next few years. If GitHub is already having existential trouble at the beginning of the curve, what hope do they have to scale up with their current business model if AI usage actually does ramp up exponentially?

kyrra 5mo ago

Saas code hosting seems to be the problem here. If companies self hosted, they could deal with the scaling problems themselves.

lelanthran 5mo ago
> Saas code hosting seems to be the problem here. If companies self hosted, they could deal with the scaling problems themselves. If all companies did this, there'd be no free tier on Github. You get the free tier because the SaaS customers are subsidising the free tier.

watwut 5mo ago

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.

logicchains 5mo ago

>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.

einsteinx2 5mo ago

> 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?

aliasxneo 5mo ago
It doesn't. It just means if they were having problems before, they've now been made significantly worse by AI (on the free tier). All I'm saying is that the problem is bigger than, "Microsoft sucks."
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

phpnode 5mo ago

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).