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I think this is the curse of scale, but also of pseudo-leaders who think leadership is "pushing engineering to rapid-fire features for number go up." You tell
by figassis 2mo ago
I think this is the curse of scale, but also of pseudo-leaders who think leadership is "pushing engineering to rapid-fire features for number go up."
You tell engineers and engineering leaders to "just add this one feature, it's really important, what's the ETA? No, that's too late, the market will have moved on, this is existential, you're a bottleneck," fire, hire, fire, hire. Meanwhile the CEO feels great, because they're delivering. The reports look nice, the posts get written, the lectures get given on X and LinkedIn about what steering a ship really means.
Then the issues that required your system to actually be robust, the ones that required engineers to have spent the time engineering, show up. And it's way too late. You cannot move faster, no matter how much money you throw at it.
It gets bad enough that everyone is now telling the CEO 70% of the platform needs refactoring, and even that is like solving the three-body problem, because every domain boundary is broken. Claude can't reason about any component of the system but is very confident it understands it, and ten seconds later tells you "You're right! And I won't sugarcoat it, I completely misrepresented this concept, let me go fix that by rewriting this other module."
You can't rebuild GitHub. You can't rebuild components of it in reasonable time over live data and migrate over without very public incidents. So now the CEO feels very, very dumb, and can't admit it.
Meanwhile a new company capitalizes on your lack of leadership and launches a competitor...and the cycle starts anew.
- Fuzzwah 2mo agoAnd then consider that GitHub hasn't had their own CEO for a year now.
- devin 2mo agoIn name, sure. Does it matter who you call the person directing the chaos?
- encomiast 2mo agoI can't speak for Github's situation specifically, but I work in an org that is often cursed by "acting" leadership. People in these acting roles don't have a real mandate to do much other than follow orders, try not break anything, and keep the seat warm. They basic tread water, which in many environments is better described as drowning more slowly.
- devin 2mo agoI can appreciate that, but GitHub was acquired nearly 10 years ago. Let's not sit around pretending that GitHub was some fully autonomous business unit when they had a "CEO". Maybe it was _better_, but I would still imagine it was still some form of "in name only". That's the just the nature of acquisitions.
- philipov 2mo agoWhich company is capitalizing on GitHub's lack of leadership?
- nish__ 2mo agoAmazon. I fired up a vps to replace GitHub.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mackenney 2mo agoHave you used Linear lately? They are eating github's lunch from the issues side imo
- atomicnumber3 2mo agoLiterally every single company is currently building both an AI router and a git repo hosting solution. Also OSS like forgejo is taking off too.
- figassis 2mo agoCursor for one https://cursor.com/origin https://cursor.com/origin They announced this on the day of the outage, yesterday.
- iamcoder18 2mo agoCode.storage is able to handle large scales too: https://code.storage/ https://code.storage/ +-------------------------+-------------------------------+ | Total storage limit | Unlimited | | Git request rate limits | Unlimited (Seen: 500+/s/repo) | | API rate limits | Unlimited (Seen: 15k+/s) | | Max repos | Unlimited | | Concurrent writes | 30+ | | Repository size limit | 32TB | | Git LFS | Supported | | GitHub/3rd party sync | Supported | +-------------------------+-------------------------------+
- Barbing 2mo agoYeah GitHub could just migrate to your company tonight and everything would be fine by morning
- jdelman 2mo agoSo you work for them?
- iamcoder18 2mo agoNo, I just think it's a great concept and pricing seems good too.
- paustint 2mo agoWAT is the landing page all about, my brain can't process it. I had to close the tab after 10 seconds as I got immediate anxiety.
- figassis 2mo agoYou made me look, are they on drugs?
- birkey 2mo agoChange is inevitable. Users will demand features and then you need to keep supporting them. I think GitHub's recent issues ishttps://www.birkey.co/2026-08-17-githubs-recent-crisis-has-a-simple-fix.html https://www.birkey.co/2026-08-17-githubs-recent-crisis-has-a... more of a symptom of current AI slop than thier eng culture or structure. I put some of my thoughts here:
- twistedpair 2mo agoGitHub simply isn't an agent code building platform. They're a RoR git host from 2008 running on an ancient MySQL setup that by some miracle continues to stay up, some of the time. Their APIs are garbage from an agentic perspective. Try using Terraform to curate your GH org of a few hundred repos. Just running the `tf plan` will take 10min, because it's making thousands of API calls. Where's the bulk and batch APIs? No such thing. They are simply not agentic scale. Want to rerun the plan for your entire cloud vendor with thousands of VMs, IAM roles, buckets, etc... it'll run faster than checking on your repo labels. GH needs rewritten from the ground up. The "repo is everything" arch has been creaking and falling over form many years now.