GitHub, including Enterprise (so not just Azure’s fault), has become unreliable, low quality software.

I say unreliable because I cannot rely on it to accurately do what it claims to do. I cannot trust any number. I cannot trust that actions I invoke will actually happen. I cannot trust that taking action will not have mysterious side effects (e.g. re-opening an issue my boss’s boss closed in 2017 without explanation). I think I trust the underlying git infra but at this point I’m not sure why I do.

I say low quality because it is extremely slow at random moments, gets into broken inconsistent UI states, has baffling UX choices that make it harder to navigate than it should be (particularly with new UIs), and overall just doesn’t have the fit and finish we should expect from software in 1996 - or 2026, or literally any time in between.

Some of the oldest PRs could no longer be found.

For example, when I decided to continue my eight-year-old PR https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/104948, I couldn't see it - neither in search nor while navigating through pages.

Direct links still work.

Dirty reads is a classic symptom of scaling poorly. Eventually consistent database writes are fine, but it's a bad look if a user takes an action and then doesn't see the results of their action.

The fact that there's so much indirection between what happens in the registers and memory in the machine, the underlying reality being modeled by software, and the information displayed semantically to the users, is a travesty.

Software could be so much simpler and more reliable. There's so much bloat that is necessary to solve problems created by bloat. I hope we find our way out of this mess sooner rather than later. I'd hate for entire generations to suffer the current state of software whereas the theoretical understanding necessary to make things better was produced very early in the history of programmable computers.

I was having the problem yesterday that the GitHub API sometimes simply doesn't list an in progress workflow run in the output when I specifically filter for it:

"api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/runs?status=in_progress" -> outputs 3 workflow runs

5 seconds later -> outputs 2 workflow runs

5 seconds later -> outputs same 3 workflow runs again

Apparently they make no guarantees of any type of consistency or continuity in output, which has the side effect of also making it completely useless.

I think they struggle with two things

1) counting

The reason is that their primary source of truth (traditional database) and their search index (elasticsearch) are out of sync.

The issues/pulls pages used to be showing the data from the primary data source, and then they changed it so everything is search, including the basic props is:pr and state:open.

> Really curious as to what’s going on over there, if you’ve got any insight let me know!

Microsoft. That's the answer. Microsoft is happening over there.

These days I was surprised to see, on my personal computer, information from PRs in private repos from my work’s org on GitHub. These are usually secured behind SSO flows which I don’t/can’t do on personal devices. So now I also don’t trust them to keep our code private anymore either. Nice.

It used to be that you could have a single GitHub account and join multiple orgs, some of which have enterprise plans with GitHub. They completely fumbled this during the pressure to ship AI features. Some enterprise controls that are supposed to affect only my work at a specific GitHub org affects me account-wide. I’m part of quite a few orgs on GitHub for OSS projects, and I never consented for that one org’s policies to basically take over my account.

I thought of going through the process of creating another account specifically for my work at this company, but GitHub is itself solving the problem in a very unique way: by being a place I don’t want to be in after I clock out.

There's tonnes of UI bugs. A more severe one I've experienced is that my approved PRs have been shown as still waiting on review, leading some of them to be delayed by weeks.

This appears to be a security problem in some contexts. I've been able to see issue counts for repositories that I have not been granted access to yet (the view with the invite accept button). I can't actually get to the issues but I can see how many there are.

Calling this "severe" feels overblown. It's a UI mismatch likely caused by using multiple caches that are out of sync. I feel like every engineer on this site has encountered this exact bug at one point or another. It's an easy one to run into, especially in bigger orgs.

GitHub's downfall must be studied. At the same time as all of these reliability issues, they've been introducing a variety of small UI updates that don't make any meaningful updates either...

The same counting problem exists with GitHub issues. I notice this every time I close an issue, and the count of open issues is still one higher than the actual number (until I reload the page).

I know this pain because, right now, I have zero PRs opens, yet the PR tab is always saying I have 1. It's plainly stupid.

My phone consistently says that I have one more update than they'll actually let me download... what that one phantom app is, I'll never know...

I have got an insight alright. Microsoft took it over.

I have been seeing this for one-two years already. They cannot count how many packages I have.

https://github.com/vanyauhalin?tab=packages

AI will solve this

Press "Next"

This got to be the extinguish phase from the EEE Microsoft playbook. Prior acquisition, Github was very liked and very focus, then Microsoft happened in their embrace phase, telling us EEE was something of the past. While trying to show good faith they extended the platform and this is now the very last phase

rails + russian doll style caching + large engineering team + azure as a platform = recipe for this exact problem.

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