This is the predictable outcome of subordinating the GitHub product to the overarching "AI must be part of everything whether it makes sense or not" mandate coming down from the top. It was only a year ago that GitHub was moved under the "CoreAI" group at Microsoft, and there's been plenty of stories of massive cost-cutting and forcing teams to focus on AI workflows instead of their actual product priorities. To the extent they are drinking their own Kool-Aid, this sort of ops failure is also an entirely predictable outcome of too much reliance on LLM-generated code and workflows rather than human expertise, something we see happening at an alarming scale in a number of public MS repos.

Hopefully it will get bad enough fast enough that they'll recognize they need to drastically change how they are operating. But I fear we're just witnessing a slow slide into complacency and settling for being a substandard product with monopoly-power name recognition.