There has to be some economic incentive in place if their scaling issues impact the entire platform. If their system can't handle it then they need a toll system for these agents until the scaling is in place.

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ramraj07 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

They made the judgement call to make private accounts free before the onslaught of AI. Now every coding agent is using GitHub as their file system backend and pushing it to limits no one has heard of.

If Microsoft had brains they would leverage it to become the de facto file system for all ai agents before cursor or anthropic figure it out.

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dannyw an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm sure they have KPIs, and I wouldn't be surprised if one of their KPIs is % growth in agentic/AI-driven actions.

Be careful what you wish for, because we might get a toll system for humans instead.

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tom1337 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

They probably had a redistribution of free-tier and paid-tier usage in the last year-ish.

Just backseat gaming but a lot of those issues could probably be solved if they'd (temporarly) reduce the free tier. I'd say simply dropping Actions from it would reduce the load by a lot because then most vibe coders wouldn't bother integrating a CI/CD and either just use local pre-commit scripts or stop using those entirely. Not using a CI also drops the requirement for using PRs on solo-dev projects so they might also reduce load there.

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za_creature an hour ago | parent [-]

I agree. We should also consider cutting residential electricity and plumbing, since that extra water could be used to cool down all the extra power allocated to data centers.

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conductr 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

As a fan of analogies, this one is horrible. The magnitude of impact is so different. The impact of the GitHub change would be a mild and fleeting annoyance for those impacted. They just have to prompt a refactor, simple with LLM. It effects the biggest leeches in the GitHub ecosystem, so it’s targeted. The public utility impacts everyone and has no simple alternative or adjustment, people are stuck to suffer through it.

	▲	za_creature 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's not an analogy. I use github actions. Many open source projects use github actions since it's _there_. In exchange, github gains conversions since users of their free tier grow accustomed with the service and recommend it for corporate use as well. This system worked pre-LLM and turned github into the de facto _hub_ for software development. It was so good that microsoft, a company previously known for its "developers, developers, developers" stance decided to spend a cool bill on it. The proposed suggestion is that we all must make sacrifices for the machine god: Developers shouldn't write code, only correct the machine when it's wrong, mathematicians must read the slop and derive new science from it and regular people must refrain from talking dirty to it so then why the fuck not give it our water and power too?