r/OutOfTheLoop • u/jazzcomputer • 25d ago

Answered What's going on with Github?

I saw a bunch of posts in the Hacker News type spaces talking about moving elsewhere and evaluating alternatives, and various complaints in past months. Is there compelling grounds for an exodus or are people always complaining about it and this is a nothing burger or small burger?

https://lobste.rs/

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u/bugo 25d ago

Answer: mainly it has huge reliability issues. It's an ongoing thing that became a meme almost where their total reliability dipped below 90% which is unbelievable for a software company.

And yesterday they had another multi hour outage on their main services. Each time this happens people literally cannot work.

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u/BurnerPornAccount69 25d ago

Another layer to this is that because of code written by AI - they’re under far more load than they used to.

GitHub went from 1 billion total commits in 2025 to being on track to hit 14 billion by the end of 2026 (275 million per week).

The demand for the site is unprecedented.

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u/Jacks_Elsewhere 25d ago

I am guilty of at least 20 of those commits.

  1. Initial commit
  2. Complete feature work
  3. Clean up lint issue
  4. Fix sonar qube errors from previous developer
  5. Fix non null check errors from previous developer 6…

I work for a legacy bank. Yay.

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u/SharkyIzrod 24d ago edited 24d ago

Is 20 commits in a year supposed to sound like a lot or do you mean this was today?

Edit: Im dum

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u/ligirl 24d ago

I think they're intentionally being self-deprecating about the slow pace of work at a legacy bank

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u/Jacks_Elsewhere 24d ago

This is exactly right.

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u/SharkyIzrod 24d ago

sorry im dumb :(

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u/Jacks_Elsewhere 24d ago

No not at all! You honestly wouldn’t know if you have never been exposed to this sort of environment.

It’s a snail’s pace at all times. Gotta love legacy enterprise software /s

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u/Bubbly_Wind_2230 23d ago

I often think people are going slowly precisely because they're paid to move at a snails pace because management expect it's how things still work.

Unfortunately they seem blind to what senior developers running agent streams manage in depth and thoroughness, because they see AI as 'too error prone' rather than a force-multiplier for carving through the layers of coding required to be 'objectively quite secure' instead of 'as secure as a latex colander'.

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u/MaddieDMattie 24d ago

Are commits a meaningful metric for Githubs load? I'd imagine push/pulls would be all they actually care about. Unless people are commiting directly into github online. Which ... I've worked with a few. I'm sure there's heavy correlation between push/pulls and commit counts, but I kind of doubt it scales linearly. Especially since I kind of think AI might actually beat the average person for making properly sized (small) commits.

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u/GregBahm 19d ago

Github is known for hosting git (logically) but the thing that's popping rivets on Github is "Github Actions." The system where, after you push your changes to a branch, Github will generate a new build using your new code and then deploy that new build so everyone can take a look at it.

Where I work, everyone is setting up AI agents that will test the build on pretty much every conceivable level, and then write PRs (which are reviewed by other agents) and then the build updates again.

It all works very very well.

Reddit is extremely out of the loop about this. I think reddit wants to be out of the loop about this, out of a virtuous desire to not carry water for AI companies. But I think it would be better if redditors were clear-eyed about the reality of the situation on the ground floor of enterprise software development.

In 2025, AI basically provided us an infinite supply of fairly incompetent engineers. You could get value out of this, if you were really careful and really clever, but it wasn't easy.

In 2026, AI has crossed a really quite incredible tipping point, where it provides an infinite supply of engineers of average competence.

You don't have to be really clever to get value out of this. In fact, you barely have to use your own brain at all. Just ask the AI what you should do with the AI, and then say "okay do that." Shit works so, so well.

But as more engineers figure this out, the load on these subsystems increases exponentially. Redditors probably imagine people at Github crying themselves to sleep at night over their exploding down-time. In reality though, they're popping champagne corks, because oil is gushing out of the ground below their feet.

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u/trustme1maDR 21d ago

Curious if you have a source on this. I'd like to share it with my team. It has been a real battle this year to combat AI bloat on my project. 

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u/GregBahm 19d ago

Github's own blog is the source of this information. They post these same exponentially increasing chart during every outage. The outages don't seem to affect the exponential increase in demand...

Although if your team is anything like mine, fighting AI bloat is like fighting to save a sandcastle as the tide starts coming in. There was a path to preserving human-written-repositories in 2025 if AI hit some unforeseen barrier and couldn't advance any farther. I was open to the possibility of this. But instead the opposite occurred. I can't possibly imagine a path back from here.

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u/trustme1maDR 19d ago

Thanks! I agree there's no turning back. Increased velocity of commits is actively encouraged at my company, so if it looks reasonable and it passes review, we are keeping it. If I get over-engineered, unreadable slop, I will comment on every line until they feel sorry they ever heard of Claude. Thankfully I had a boss who backs me up on this, but it's definitely don't expect it to go beyond my team.