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"Since April, monthly commits have grown from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion. " Wow, that is some incredible growth in a really short time.
by blakesterz 2mo ago
"Since April, monthly commits have grown from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion. "
Wow, that is some incredible growth in a really short time.
- brookst 2mo agoIt really is. I know I've gone from tens a month to thousands a month. They have to be projecting >100B/month in the next year or two.
- xyzsparetimexyz 2mo agowow. they should really institute a maximum amount of individual pushes per-month per-user.
- xienze 2mo agoWhich will just increase the cries of "enshittification" and hasten the mass migration to the next free platform that surely, this time, won't ever go down.
- Avicebron 2mo agoWe're small enough that we've been hosting our git infra for about a year now, I wonder how many other companies figured out they could make the trade. I've had a Github since a couple years after they started and I think they are going to become a Stack Overflow, albeit slower with MS at the helm. If Github is going to be 99% slop it's going to be really hard to use as a fun tool to show what you can do, what you've worked on, side projects, etc. I took github off my resume and I'm probably not going to relaunch my weblog if I end up job hunting, too much low-effort crap and people basically copying what a lot of us had been doing manually for years to really feel like it's anything other than a negative signal.
- inigyou 2mo agoIronically a bunch of people already migrated to Codeberg and then Codeberg announced "heads up, we actually don't want your AI slop, we're for real projects only" and AI coders threw a shitfit on HN.
- consumer451 2mo agoThat would just drive users into the arms of the alternatives, which would love to own the world's code... like Cursor/Musk. Microsoft and GitHub's only option is to suck it up, absorb this growth, and lower failure rates. They have the money, so that's not the issue. As someone on the sidelines, this is really interesting to watch unfold.
- Macha 2mo agoWell either they can handle this load that Microsoft can't, or they can't. If Microsoft are going to continue to be unreliable in the absence of the rate limit then: If alternatives can handle the load, those who would consider those alternatives if Microsoft opposed a rate limit are likely to move to them anyway. If alternatives aren't able to manage, then user's aren't going to jump since those services won't actually provide more usage.
- b112 2mo agoI think the number of commits is a red herring, but that said, I wonder how spiky their load is. Imagine a fee over X commits, but only during certain hours. I can imagine 90% of the commits over 6 or 8 timezones, maybe 50% over 4 right now...
- fragmede 2mo agoIt's not a red herring, every commit necessitates a database hit.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- consumer451 2mo agoI was thinking the same thing at first: ideas to increase product limits on GitHub, to increase reliability given limited infra. However, there are sharks in the water, and with the diminishing mean of user technical knowledge, the product actually needs to become even more free. GitHub likely needs even lower friction. "All it takes" is the insanely heavy technical lift to support that. There is no other solution. All the C-Suite needs to do is foster an environment with well-thought through, and possibly over-funded engineering, at the edge of the art. That sounds like an amazing challenge.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- saghm 2mo agoI still remember when they decided to limit the number of private repos you could have as a free user. Kind of silly to me at the time, and even more so now!
- bragr 2mo agoI remember when you had to pay for private repos in the first place.
- riffraff 2mo agoInitially there were no private repos for free users at all, it was a selling point for bitbucket that they offered that.
- inigyou 2mo agoI don't think it's silly for free users to be restricted. If you want something, pay for it. Free trials are trials.
- slashdave 2mo agoso... when you reach your monthly limit in the middle of the month, what is the recourse? Or, is the idea just to drive everyone away from your platform?
- eudamoniac 2mo agoUh, pay money for the service you're using constantly?
- toephu2 2mo agoNot that impressive when you realize it's mostly due to AI slop edit: AI actually writes 99.9% of my code these days. I'm just saying of course the number of commits to github is going to climb astronomically due to AI.
- seizethecheese 2mo agoImpressive for whom? It's impressive for the service to have such growth at that scale, the code being slop is somewhat irrelevant. Your comment just seems like mood affiliation (AI should be dismissed, growth was from AI, therefore growth should be dismissed).
- Aachen 2mo agoHow is it impressive if we all know it's autogenerated? There's no more people there than there were before. Heck, at ~2x growth that's possibly a decrease in real humans there since bots generate loads of them per person
- airstrike 2mo agoIt's an impressively large quantity of X, not an impressively good X.
- Aachen 2mo agoThat's not how I read the statement "It's impressive for the service to have such growth at that scale" that this was a reply to. They do seem to think the growth is impressive, not the absolute quantity, about which I agree with you
- gamegod 2mo agoYeah, seems like AI slop is going to kill GitHub's free tier. I just don't see how the economics of having to host this much slop and provide service to slopcoders is going to convert into dollars for them otherwise. None of the humans involved are going to end up in big enterprises. It's all cost, with no pathway to revenue.
- mikert89 2mo agoalot of distributed systems in big companies grow at this rate, its not exponential, its mundane
- tracerbulletx 2mo agoWhen a service that was already the primary git hosting provider for most of the world for 20 years grows at that rate its not mundane and its not comparable to any example.
- mikert89 2mo agoAWS saw this growth every year for two decades, hyper growth tech sees it all the time
- jeremyjh 2mo agoThe absolute number doesn’t matter nearly as much as the change in rate of growth. The number of commits had not been doubling every six months at GitHub for a long time. At Amazon if traffic volume consistently doubled every six months that is actually quite a lot easier to plan for, it just becomes part of everything they do from very early on.
- mikert89 2mo agoim not buying that github is a unique engineering problem, harder than the rest of hyperscalars.
- jeremyjh 2mo agoNo one said it is unique. But if you take an infrastructure and engineering org that had been growing at 10% a year for a decade, you are going to have a different set of capabilities and practices in place. Adapting to a new reality of doubling every few months will predictably produce failures anywhere. GitHub is not unique in that regard.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoNot really. It's AI commits. Not quality commits.
- aaronvg 2mo agoit doesn't matter though, commits create load in their system
- jazzyjackson 2mo agoOne has to wonder what the point of a collaborative version control system even is if the software we’re writing is one-shotted by a call to an API ?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- whatsThisBtn4 2mo ago[flagged]
- sgarland 2mo agoSerious question: do you think your 6 year old is learning coding from prompting an AI? I have had excellent results from using AI, but it’s only because I understand what it is I’m asking it to look at, and know when it’s wrong. This is proven on a nearly daily basis at my job, where, with identical agents and prompts, I see designs being pushed with objectively incorrect facts, sub-optimal code in PRs, and a general explosion of slop. That tells me that it still very much matters if you know how to do the job without the help of robots.
- whatsThisBtn4 2mo agoCoding is dead.
- tremon 2mo agoWhy is Github talking about number of commits here, and not pushes? Are there a lot of tools/people using github as an online editing platform?
- recursive 2mo agoI'm not following your line of questioning. Without ever using github as an online editing platform, you can do one push with two new commits.
- Brian_K_White 2mo agoCommits are not expensive, pushes are. You can do any number of commits before you do one push, unless you are editing online, in which case every act is it's own commit & push. You can rig up a local ide to pathologically commit+push per save, but you can do literally anything, so what you can do is immaterial.
- leptons 2mo ago>You can rig up a local ide to pathologically commit+push per save The dev system we use for a 3rd party hosting provider (a big one) requires a commit and push for every file save while we're developing. I created a build system for this that copies the whole repo to a temp folder. As we save changes to files in the main repo folder, the build system watches for changes and copies the changed file to the temp folder, then does a commit on the temp folder and pushes to a an intermediary repo in github which then triggers an action that causes the 3rd party system to update from the intermediary repo. This way we don't pollute our main source repo with a commit every time we save an update to a source file. It's not my favorite way to develop but it's caused us no real problems except when github goes down.
- ninkendo 2mo ago> requires a commit and push for every file save I don’t think I could imagine a stupider idea than this if I tried. To paraphrase Babbage: I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a solution.
- shdtabasum 2mo agoLOL, this kind of things will happen when projects like Bun (https://github.com/oven-sh/bun https://github.com/oven-sh/bun) are running on auto. :)
- aeve890 2mo ago3.3k open issues holy shit
- tecleandor 2mo agoAnd 5K PRs. I'm crying.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 2mo ago> 5k PRs Wow, is Bun the record holder for number of PRs? I recall GitHub recommends to keep the number of PR to a certain level due things such as GitHub Actions slowing down.
- mananaysiempre 2mo agoNixpkgs has 11k open PRs at the moment (a lot of them routine version bumps and such), so no. But then Nixpkgs isn’t a piece of software in the conventional sense: the monorepo does contain a few of those, but most of it is a giant collection of basically-independent build scripts.
- utopiah 2mo agothat's the interesting part : forges are being abused. Sure AI workflows might be a non-negligible share of all that usage but still the point is that initially forges existed to help developers collectively share a state then solve problems. Nowadays they are basically online filesystems with better notifications for other software to interact with and only optionally developers actually communicating.
- m4rtink 2mo ago
- ex-aws-dude 2mo agoI mean if I set up a for loop spamming my own SAAS it would be incredible growth too
- sandeepkd 2mo agoNot sure to be honest, from a machine perspective 2X should never be a big deal, unless 1.4 was the threshold or sweet state and no one thought too much about scale and architecture beyond that
- muglug 2mo agoIf you’re the size of GitHub and you’ve been running your infra for years with very little variation in traffic patterns you have a strong incentive to optimise costs for that existing behaviour.
- sandeepkd 2mo agoI am afraid thats now how infrastructure works from what I have seen. The number that really matters is QPS. For any system the QPS varies through out the day and across the week and months. Most design considerations easily absorb any 2X increase. Pick up any company and the chances are that the servers are over provisioned, no one takes chances specially with critical components. What you have going on with Github is mix of multiple things. Traffic alone is not the cause from what little I know, it does adds to the problem for sure 1. Infrastructure is being moved to use Azure, and overall all the cloud providers are struggling with hardware at the moment (same is going on for linkedin too) 2. The core teams, the people who knew the existing systems have either been laid off or moved from Github 3. Microsoft veterans are brought in to fill the gap across the board, they are trying their best but its a lot of unknown for them
- Anon1096 2mo agoHow much infra have you seen of the top 100 sites in the world? I've worked on multiple top 10, and absorbing a 2x increase (and the peak is very likely more than 2x) is a very very hard problem that would cause hundreds of pagers to go off and load shedding to very high degrees. There is just not tons of unused capacity lying around in wait at the scale of github. "No one takes chances with critical components" is also very wrong for the simple fact that you don't know which is the weakest link in the chain until it fails.
- RunSet 2mo agoTruly incredible in every sense of the word.
- meerita 2mo agoIt's almost double. If you have scaling prepared, it should be linear, but I doubt they've prepared for this.
- brazukadev 2mo agothey are/were in the middle of a migration
- pseudosavant 2mo agoFor some context, in June they said commits "commits nearly doubled year over year, crossing 1.4 billion per month". Now, it has more than doubled that in just a few months. https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilot-app-the-agent-native-desktop-experience/ https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...
- fishfasell 2mo agoMakes sense given the ubiquity of agentic coding. I made a joke to my coworker today that all we do is make sure AI agents can communicate with other AI agents.
- pseudosavant 2mo agoIt’s funny how the quality of the average commit message has gone up, now that we rarely read or write them directly anymore.
- amarshall 2mo agoHas it? Most of the LLM-generated commit messages and PR descriptions I read are needlessly verbose and miss the point: elucidating the why of a change rather than the what. If I actually pose a question based on them the author often tells me “yea that was some AI generated nonsense, I rewrote it now”.
- asdfsa32 2mo agoYou may be confusing articulate and confident with useful and accurate.
- fartfeatures 2mo agoThey really aren't. AI commit messages are much more thorough and correct than some of the stuff I've seen humans do over the years e.g. Fix, Fixup, Fixed some Stuff, Should work now, Definitely should work now etc etc etc.
- mawadev 2mo agoI would give the growth hacker on their team a big raise, these KPIs are incredible
- m4rtink 2mo agoSo much more stuff and growing- what it is actually useful for ? Are we getting actually more done than with previous volumes or is it just all wasted energy?
- compass_copium 2mo agoYou already know the answer to that question
- parapsychic 2mo agoTo some extent we are getting more things done as well. In my company (mid-sized startup), they're making us push features every other day now as opposed to maybe 1-2 features per person per sprint. Back when I joined, things were a lot slower. Today, they expect freshers to push new features on day one. But ofc, slop has increased a lot more as well.
- thisOtterBeGood 2mo agoThat's very fast. Feels like you cannot really review this code so it's all just "working" AI code with few railguards and few human supervision?
- throwawayqqq11 2mo agoJumping on the great asymmetry of output between humans and llms, yet still being responsible for the product is pure kafka.
- croes 2mo agoAnd how many of that features are actually used? How long do they last until the get replaced by the next feature?
- MattRix 2mo agoI have some big issues with this technology and the companies behind it, but I know of quite a few people personally who were not previously coders but have now been able to use LLMs to make their own custom software, solving real problems they had.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- chanux 2mo agoOh the productivity increase. I feel it in my fingers. I feel it in my veins.
- flohofwoe 2mo agoIt's like cancer growth though, not the 'good' kind of growth ;) E.g. I doubt that the number of Github users has doubled in that month too. Github should probably introduce daily commit- and merge-limits that slow down excessive clanker activity, but are high enough that a human doesn't notice. Alternative put users with excessive resource usage on their own 'sub-infrastructure' so that when this is overloaded, the regular users are not affected by the outage.
- pelasaco 2mo agothis is impressive too "We have since added more than 3 million CPU cores, 120 petabytes of high-speed storage, and significant network capacity"
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]