What do we think is more to blame for GitHub's massive decrease in quality? I've heard the following theories:

1. Increasing amount of AI-generated code in their codebase, decreasing the quality of the service.

2. Bought by Microsoft, and their bad engineering culture has spread to GitHub.

Perhaps it's a bit of both.

Azure migration is the most plausible explanation I've heard. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173

I'd add a third point: record service usage.

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...

It's been on a downward trend before agentic coding took over. I suspect it's a mix of Microsoft culture and Microsoft infrastructure. It's starting to feel about the same quality as other Microsoft services.

Short aside, I have to rehost dotnet CLI binaries because their hosting infrastructure is so unreliable that it was causing CI failures regularly.

It started being bad after MS.

It started being very bad when MS pushed for AI

It began pretty much immediately after the acquisition. There was an uptime chart making the rounds a while back, and less than a year in, the all green data points of pre-Microsoft Github turned to lots of red. I assume brain drain, as everyone vested or otherwise completed their contractual requirements and cashed out. And, Microsoft has never had a great reliability culture in their cloud services, so no in-house talent to effectively take over.

I would say uptime and UX/UI:

uptime:

Incomplete pull request results in repositoriesSubscribe Update - We are actively reindexing the remaining ElasticSearch indexes. Our priority is ensuring correctness and avoiding further impact. We are taking a measured approach to safely backfill data and will share additional updates as progress continues. Apr 28, 2026 - 15:58 UTC Update - After yesterday’s incident, we are investigating cases where /pulls and /repo/pulls pages are not showing all indexed pull requests. This is because our Elasticsearch cluster does not currently contain all indexed documents.

No pull request data has been lost. As pull requests are updated, they will be reindexed. We are also working on accelerating a full reindex so these pages return complete results again. Apr 28, 2026 - 14:51 UTC Investigating - We are investigating reports of degraded performance for Pull Requests Apr 28, 2026 - 14:17 UTC

https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

#2 makes #1 a big problem. AI-generated code is fine if you have thorough engineering practices around it. Are they blindly merging in AI generated code without review? Maybe. Thats an issue of engineering practices, not of the use of generative AI in general.

Nah they must be actively moving infrastructure (to azure?) for the amount of outages they have

Not necessarily culture, it could be just forcing to migrate to azure that is not reliable, no?

Note: I'm a graybeard coming from SVN era.

GitHub took a massive hit in credibility when it got bought by Microsoft. We are a burned generation, we have seen the worst of Microsoft. This created a massive crack in the foundation of trust for most people.

Then Copilot happened. Some people dug how the training is done, and one GitHub employee responded by mail that every public repository including GPL repositories are included (the relevant Tweets are deleted unfortunately). The created crack has deepened. Some of us (incl. me) left GitHub.

As Copilot entrenched, Microsoft's product development practices and philosophy took over, and vibe coding started to be used by hordes of developers, GitHub's code foundations started to crumble. Add the big migrations they're doing & regressions they are causing on the UI now, and we're here.

GitHub's first enshittification cycle is over. Now we're starting the second cycle. The bloated, slow, entrenched hegemon's decay from relevance phase.

It'll be a slow decay. It won't fall in a day, but they golden era is long gone.