It is fairly stunning to me that we've come to accept this level of non-functional software as normal.

Surely some of your crazy kids can rummage up a CI pipeline on their laptop? 8)

Anyway, I only use GH as something to sync interesting stuff from, so it doesn't get lost.

So not at all?

My previous two startups used GitLab successfully. The smaller startup used paid-tier hosted by gitlab.com. The bigger startup (with strategic cutting-edge IP, and multinational security sensitivity) used the expensive on-prem enterprise GitLab.

(The latter startup, I spent some principal engineer political capital to move us to GitLab, after our software team was crippled by the Microsoft Azure-branded thing that non-software people had purchased by default. It helped that GitLab had a testimonial from Nvidia, since we were also in the AI hardware space.)

If you prefer to use fully open source, or have $0 budget, there's also Forgejo (forked from Gitea). I'm using it for my current one-person side-startup, and it's mostly as good as GitLab for Git, issues, boards, and wiki. The "scoped" issue labels, which I use heavily, are standard in Foregejo, but paid-tier in GitLab. I haven't yet exercised the CI features.

The down side is that the starting price is kinda high, so the math probably only works out if you also have a number of other workloads to run on the same cluster. Or if you need to run a really huge Forgejo server!

I suspect my comment history will provide the best details and overview of what we do. We'll be offering the Firecracker runner back to the Forgejo community very soon in any case.

https://lithus.eu

ETA: Tangentially, private repos became free under Microsoft ownership in 2019. If they hadn't done that, they could've extracted $4 per month from every vibe coder forever(!)

It's Microsoft. A reliable product is not a reasonable expectation.

You should reach the same conclusion by trying to use it for this purpose, but also indeed for any purpose at all. Incidents that make you unable to deploy making all your CD efforts pointless are only the cherry on top.

I learned that lesson in the 90s and became an "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft).

People sadly shall never learn: Windows 12 is going to come out and shall suck more than any previous version of Windows except Windows 11, so they'll see it as progress. Then Windows 13 is going to be an abysmal piece of crap and people shall hang to their Windows 12, wondering how it's possible that Microsoft came out with a bad OS.

There are still people explaining, today, that Microsoft ain't all bad because Windows XP was good (for some definition of good). Windows XP came out in late 2001.

Stockholm syndrome and all that.

They claim that is what they are doing right now. [1]

[1] https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...

We are in a future that nobody wanted.

It stings to have this happen as we're putting a lot of effort specifically into the core product, growing teams like Actions and increasing performance-focused initiatives on key areas like pull requests where we're already making solid progress[1]. Would love if you would reach out to me in DM around the perf issues you mentioned with diffs.

There's a lot of architecture, scaling, and performance work that we're prioritizing as we work to meet the growing code demand.

We're still investigating today's outage and we'll share a write up on our status page, and in our February Availability Report, with details on root cause and steps we're taking to mitigate moving forward.

[1] https://x.com/matthewisabel/status/2019811220598280410

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33576722

They need to start rolling back some of their most recent changes.

I mean, if they want people to start moving to self hosted GitLab, this is gonna get that ball rolling.

Do you allow me to run the following command?

    cd project; find -type f | while read f; do mv "$f" /dev/null; done

The history for today is a bit of a mess really: https://www.githubstatus.com/history

* Mandatory code reviews

* Merge queue (merge train)

If you don't need those it's good.

Also it's written in Ruby so if you think you'll ever want to understand or modify the code then look elsewhere (probably Forgejo).

I’ve only worked on a team once where we all were set up as remotes to each other and that was over a decade ago.

it's almost as if Microsoft bought it, isn't it?

I feel this is just the natural trajectory for any VC-funded "service" that isn't actually profitable at the time you adopt it. Of course it's going to change for the worse to become profitable.

It kind of would be good for everyone if they did do it though. Need to get rid of this monopoly, and maybe people will discover that there are alternatives with actually good workflows out there.

Disclaimer: I work in Microsoft (albeit in a quite disconnected part of it, nothing to do with GitHub or Copilot).

The person(s) who wanted this want Azure to get bigger and have prioritized Azure over Windows and Office, and their share price has been growing handsomely.

‘Microslop’, perhaps, but their other nickname has a $ in it for a reason.

I don’t think GitHub cares about reliability if it does anything less than that.

I know people have other problems with Google, but they do actually have incredibly high uptime. This policy was frequently applied to entire orgs or divisions of the company if they had one outage too many.

(See also: Windows, Internet Explorer, ActiveX, etc. for how that turned out)

It's great that you're working on improving the product, but the (maybe cynical) view that I've heard more than anything is that when faced with the choice of improving the core product that everyone wants and needs or adding functionality to the core product that no one wants or needs and which is actively making the product worse (e.g. PR slop), management is too focused on the latter.

What GitHub needs is a leader who is willing and able to say no to the forces enshittifying the product with crap like Copilot, but GitHub has become a subsidiary of Copilot instead and that doesn't bode well.

Their business is buying good products and turning them into shit, while wringing every cent they can out of the business. Always has been.

They have a grace period of about 2-4 years after acquisition where interference is minimal. Then it ramps up. How long a product can survive once the interference begins largely depends on how good senior leadership at that product company is at resisting the interference. It's a hopeless battle, the best you can do is to lose slowly.

some people wanted this future and put in untold amount of money to make it happen. Hint: one of them is a rabid Tolkien fan.

Nor deserved.

When I worked at the univerity we used Gitea.

Every job outside of univerity I had used Gitlab self hosted. While I don't like the UI or any aspect of Gitlab a lot, it gets the job done.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861842

After using ChatGPT for the last 6 months or so, Copilot feels like a significant downgrade. On the other hand, it did easily diagnose a build failure I was having, so it’s not useless, just not as helpful.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/865689/microsoft-claude-code-a...

Who could have POSSIBLY foreseen any kind of dire consequences?

See also their moves in the gaming industry.

But that $30 per month per user is also the cost for their cloud-hosted version. It also includes quite a bit of CI/CD runtime.

This includes regular checks on CI checks using `gh`. My skill / cli are broken right now:

`gh pr checks 8174 --repo [repo] 2>&1)`

   Error: Exit code 1

   Non-200 OK status code: 429 Too Many Requests
   Body:
   {
     "message": "This endpoint is temporarily being throttled. Please try again later. For more on scraping GitHub and how it may affect your rights, please review our Terms of Service (https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service)",
     "documentation_url": "https://docs.github.com/graphql/using-the-rest-api/rate-limits-for-the-rest-api",
     "status": "429"
   }

Btw, someone prompt Claude code “make an equivalent to GitHub.com and deploy it wherever you think is best. No questions.”

> It's owned by Microsoft.

I see no contradictions here.

If you have a captive audience, you can get away with making the product shittier because it's so difficult for anyone to move away from it - both from an engineering standpoint and from network effects.

And then many UI changes people have been complaining about are related to things like copilot being forcibly integrated - which is very much in the "Microsoft expect to gain a profit by encouraging it's use" camp.

It's pretty rare companies make a UI because they want a bad UI, it's normally a second order thing from other priorities - such as promoting other services or encouraging more ad impressions or similar.

I mean, that's obviously not the case, but it's weird that it happened twice!

jokes aside it’s all because of hyper financial engineering. Every dollar every little cent must be maximized. Every process must be exploited and monetized, and there are a small group of people who are essentially driving all this all across the world in every industry.

I understand that the 'updating the part of the page that's changed' functionality is now dramatically slower, more unresponsive, and less reliable than the 'reload the entire thing' approach was, and it feels like browsing the site via Citrix over dial-up half the time, but look, sacrifices have to be made in the name of making things better even if the sacrifice is that things get worse instead.

This is all grapevine but yeah, you read that right.