I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with pricing updates. My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude. So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over? This seems like a basic economics problem.

Because any price at all will immediately cause users to shift to another platform, and GitHub's value is that it is _the_ place to put your code on the internet.

The people with the spreadsheets have determined the value of this loss leader to be too enormous to shut it off.

> My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude

Seems presumptuous to assume a root case while the incident is still ongoing, no?

They also sell the machinery to produce the slop (through OpenAI at least).

If they make it harder to push slop on github, people might treat it as an incentive to generate less slop. Less tokens sold. Bad. Very bad.

The github paying customers are not going to move away.

Plus, it's probably genuinely hard to scale. And they can't throw compute at the problem - all compute is already going to the LLMs.

I have wondered the same thing. Even a small fee like $50 a year would get rid of a lot of AI slop that justs eats up resources.

I would gladly pay that fee if it means Github is reliable for paying customers.

They would benefit from a HackerNews-esque karma system.

they want that code (from private repos) to train the models

Microsoft executives have an incentive to pretend that AI is great and scaling it has no problems