Yeah, I had the exact same response after reading the post. I mean, I'm all for jumping on the Microsoft hate train, but not if it misses the elephant in the room. Let's say the _perfect_ GitHub replacement spawns tomorrow? What's preventing the same infrastructure challenges of millions of lines of AI-generated code destroying it?

I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.

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einsteinx2 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> I mean, I'm all for jumping on the Microsoft hate train, but not if it misses the elephant in the room.

That elephant didn’t even exist yet for the first few years of poor uptime shown in the graph in TFA… I don’t really disagree if we’re talking about the recent uptime issues, but how does that explain the years 2020-2023?

	▲	aliasxneo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It doesn't. It just means if they were having problems before, they've now been made significantly worse by AI (on the free tier). All I'm saying is that the problem is bigger than, "Microsoft sucks."

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majormajor 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.

Private corporate codebases are a poor fit for GH because they don't benefit from public social graph effects. And the typical codebase isn't so large as to be technically challenging to deal with with OSS tools. I'd guess they make up a substantial share of revenue.

But once the reliability is called into question, self-hosted or smaller alternatives start to look good. Although there's some trickiness there if you want to be super cautious about making sure you can get to your code+infra in case of a vendor incident, especially if you're cloud based.

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kyrra 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Saas code hosting seems to be the problem here. If companies self hosted, they could deal with the scaling problems themselves.

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logicchains 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>What's preventing the same infrastructure challenges of millions of lines of AI-generated code destroying it?

There's something called "rate limits" that engineers not working for GitHub have probably heard of; it's this crazy idea that you should limit the load on your infra in order to avoid downtime. GitHub is not the first free service to ever have to deal with bots.

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bdangubic 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

of all the awful things AI is doing and will be doing to society, killing centralized code hosting and social media will be its shinniest moments, both deserve to die painful deaths

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idiotsecant 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, the terrible sin of ... Hosting code where people can find it

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icase 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

hosting code where people can find it is the reason LLMs can write code, so we kind of screwed ourselves there…

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2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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exe34 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How did people do it before github? Did everyone write everything with peek and poke?

	▲	kuboble an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Private people would keep their code locally and share the snapshot of the code using any file sharing or hosting option available. Companies had been hosting their own CVS or later svn servers.
	▲	doubled112 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Sourceforge

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ako 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why is centralized code hosting getting killed? I'm running an opensource project, >99% of the code is AI generated, could not do this without GitHub. Ai generated source code needs a place where AIs and people can collaborate. I'm expecting GitHub to be hugely successful, but mostly for an AI audience.

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chowells 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Because it's centralized. Your project pays the price for every unrelated project that's getting overloaded.

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ako 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm sure the underlying infra is not a single server, so this is mostly a period where they have to adapt to higher loads due to AI becoming actually useable in the last 8 months. It's basically proof how well AI works these days. Give it a few months so they can scale and it'll get better. Remember Twitter fail whale? Growth pains that can and will be solved.

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georgemcbay an hour ago | parent [-]

> It's basically proof how well AI works these days. Give it a few months so they can scale and it'll get better. Remember Twitter fail whale? Growth pains that can and will be solved.

GitHub's problems can technically be solved, but that doesn't mean they can be solved in a way where the economics still work out.

If AI use is 10x-ing the amount of infrastructure costs for GitHub but not 10x-ing the amount of money Microsoft brings in from GitHub then there is certainly no guarantee they will bother to solve these issues adequately.

And I'd be shocked if the revenue side of things isn't lagging way behind the extra usage post-AI-era, both because a lot of the new use is probably on the GitHub free tier, and because even on the paid tier most usage (other than CI/Actions, AFAIK) are on a fixed subscription cost per user regardless of how much you are slamming their servers and it is unclear how much they can raise that price without current enterprise users fleeing.

Twitter had a clearer goal that aligned with the financials... support more people stably, show more ads. Things are less clear with GitHub's business model where the free tier is a loss leader for the paid tier but the expansion in usage is likely to balloon the free tier usage at a far faster rate than the paid tier usage.

Also (and this part is admittedly far more speculative) if AI labs are to be believed this is still early days for AI usage and we'll still see massive usage growth over the next few years. If GitHub is already having existential trouble at the beginning of the curve, what hope do they have to scale up with their current business model if AI usage actually does ramp up exponentially?

	▲	ako 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yah, the monitization bit is challanging. I'll ask my agent to click some of the ads GitHub serves it ;-) But getting this infrastructure right is crucial for a future where most of the code is AI generated. GitHub puts microsoft in a good position to experiment and learn how to optimize GitHub (enterprise) for the future. Nate b Jones on youtube, https://youtu.be/FDkvRl1RlT0?si=AEYlUchm_oalMSzf, argues that Atlassian might be an interesting acquisition for Anthropic, as it provide most of the context AI at enterprises need. When executed well, GitHub enterprise, can offer microsoft the same value: the context AI needs in the future.