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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/in

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

notRobot 2mo ago
I am genuinely curious: > I often drive 4-8 agents at a time, many in the cloud or on different machines, To do what? How many hours a day do they run? I find it hard to come up with use cases for agents to be doing so much work constantly, but that might just be me.
- weitendorf 2mo ago
  It's usually not 24/7, it's that when I use just 1 agentic coding tool there's too much variance/hand-holding to go do something else, and also often a lot of downtime in between turns as they work. So it's a throughput problem. If there are multiple separable-enough things I also want to do, and I'm already sitting there working, I start adding more things simultaneously until I'm fully occupied. I'm also trying to get better at firing off work that is useful enough to be worth doing if it costs $2 and 10m prompting with a 50% success rate, but not worth doing if it costs me 4hr of focused work with a success rate still not close to 100%. I think right now there is a lot to be gained looking at the economics of "more annoying than hard"/grindy dev work. Now you can just pay something purpose-built for grindy dev work a fraction of what it would cost you. For example, it's relatively common for me to need to build Envoy with bazel and wait 1-2hr for my LLM agent to get past that (because it maybe takes 30m but if it ignores the cache, or makes mistakes requiring do-overs, you multiply that), or I want to have it do a bunch of benchmarking or testing that has a 10m-20m iteration time and a lot of things to iterate on. I just let them have at it and check to make sure they don't get stuck, and do something else. I'm also trying to get better at firing off work that is useful enough to be worth doing if it costs $2 and 10m prompting with a 50% success rate, but not worth doing if it costs me 4hr of focused work with a success rate still not close to 100%, because I think right now there is a lot to be gained looking at the economics of "more annoying than hard"/grindy dev work now that you can just pay something purpose-built for grindy dev work a fraction of what it would cost you, or that can read more words in a minute than you can in one day. If it doesn't work or I just abandon it halfway it doesn't matter because it cost me $1 and if it's important I'll just pay one more $1 later. I had three subagents working for 15m each earlier today gathering a bunch of data about a software dependency I was evaluating using, and they went through a ton of git commits/open source committee meetings/roadmap and historical data, and reviewed all its code. At API rate maybe it would have cost >$10, but I pay subscription rates and it was basically just a 5m writeup of resources to check and things to clarify/evaluate for me while I waited on another thing. To review all that output, and coordinate it/save it, and make it easier to include artifacts, code, etc. I just tell them to write it up in a git repo and push when they're done. IMO the biggest bottleneck with agentic development is the iteration-time and how much human effort it takes to do the last 20% to take it from slop to actually-done, IMO. But I think many things become worth doing to a slop-level of quality if the time/compute is cheap, it's useful enough to you, and the primary barrier to having it is just taking the time to ask for it.

notRobot 2mo ago

I am genuinely curious: > I often drive 4-8 agents at a time, many in the cloud or on different machines, To do what? How many hours a day do they run? I find it hard to come up with use cases for agents to be doing so much work constantly, but that might just be me.

weitendorf 2mo ago
It's usually not 24/7, it's that when I use just 1 agentic coding tool there's too much variance/hand-holding to go do something else, and also often a lot of downtime in between turns as they work. So it's a throughput problem. If there are multiple separable-enough things I also want to do, and I'm already sitting there working, I start adding more things simultaneously until I'm fully occupied. I'm also trying to get better at firing off work that is useful enough to be worth doing if it costs $2 and 10m prompting with a 50% success rate, but not worth doing if it costs me 4hr of focused work with a success rate still not close to 100%. I think right now there is a lot to be gained looking at the economics of "more annoying than hard"/grindy dev work. Now you can just pay something purpose-built for grindy dev work a fraction of what it would cost you. For example, it's relatively common for me to need to build Envoy with bazel and wait 1-2hr for my LLM agent to get past that (because it maybe takes 30m but if it ignores the cache, or makes mistakes requiring do-overs, you multiply that), or I want to have it do a bunch of benchmarking or testing that has a 10m-20m iteration time and a lot of things to iterate on. I just let them have at it and check to make sure they don't get stuck, and do something else. I'm also trying to get better at firing off work that is useful enough to be worth doing if it costs $2 and 10m prompting with a 50% success rate, but not worth doing if it costs me 4hr of focused work with a success rate still not close to 100%, because I think right now there is a lot to be gained looking at the economics of "more annoying than hard"/grindy dev work now that you can just pay something purpose-built for grindy dev work a fraction of what it would cost you, or that can read more words in a minute than you can in one day. If it doesn't work or I just abandon it halfway it doesn't matter because it cost me $1 and if it's important I'll just pay one more $1 later. I had three subagents working for 15m each earlier today gathering a bunch of data about a software dependency I was evaluating using, and they went through a ton of git commits/open source committee meetings/roadmap and historical data, and reviewed all its code. At API rate maybe it would have cost >$10, but I pay subscription rates and it was basically just a 5m writeup of resources to check and things to clarify/evaluate for me while I waited on another thing. To review all that output, and coordinate it/save it, and make it easier to include artifacts, code, etc. I just tell them to write it up in a git repo and push when they're done. IMO the biggest bottleneck with agentic development is the iteration-time and how much human effort it takes to do the last 20% to take it from slop to actually-done, IMO. But I think many things become worth doing to a slop-level of quality if the time/compute is cheap, it's useful enough to you, and the primary barrier to having it is just taking the time to ask for it.