I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it
This quote from the post resonated with me:
> I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.
The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on?
Microsoft, Greed, Outsourcing to low-cost-countries who couldn't care less and rotate entire dev teams on you every few months or so, etc...
No AI needed at all. Only humans.
I suspect it isn't even really "greed". It is just the slow mold growth of an org chart optimizing comfort for itself instead of value for customers. Generally, startups / founders are the only anti-bodies against this type of behavior.
What a weird time for our industry. On one hand, small teams have never been able to move faster than right now.
On the other, the economy and market conditions are brutal for the little guys. Incumbent behemoths hoovering up value, talent and financing.
Instead of shaking things up as usual when a major paradigm shift hits, AI has mostly been a centralizing, consolidating force. Not that I was expecting it to be otherwise, but it's certainly dismaying to witness.
Or am I being too pessimistic / glorifying the past?
This is not just the tech industry.
It's easier than ever to make your own furniture. IKEA is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to 3D-print tractor parts. John Deere is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to switch to solar power. The petroleum industry is bigger than ever.
One person reverse-engineered Coca Cola, made an exact taste-alike and published the formula. You can make some at home. Coca Cola is bigger than ever.
Something fundamental is wrong with the economy.
> It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever.
In this case: these statements aren't contradictory, they're complementary. It's easy to publish a game on Steam, where the audience are and the money is. It's also easy to publish on itch.io where no money is.
The hidden cost to competing in these industries is insane. Its so hard to build a physical product that can compete against a giant like IKEA. You need to make some with less r&d, less automation, less infrastructure and you're going to sell less units and all that needs to be price competitive against something that is made on an production line with a team of experienced engineers and sold to millions at fine margins.
It most certainly is also greed. Stockholders want returns. One way to do that is maximize profits at all costs. Greed.
I think org chart the impact is how the individual person can advance their career while doing good work. If they only get rewarded for new things, service and maintenance suffers.
What should we do? The only thing I can think of is to stay vocal about it. Never accept enshittification. Always point things out when they suck.
Not selling out, basically. Easier said than done.
Focus on open protocols, simple formats over complex vendor-specific cruft. Then you can always "fork" away from an enshittified saas.
I bet a small team of the quality of the kind developers who are attracted to hacking on Ghostty could recreate the subset of GitHub functionality they actually need in ~six months. It's just the problem of how to pay for the ongoing care, maintenance and hosting? Maybe another opportunity for Mitchell's particular brand of philanthropic OSS.
https://forgejo.org/ already exists, I suspect the issue would be hosting it at scale
DNS is the cause of all problems, but it's also the solution - just like anyone can run Apache or Nginx, so should anyone be able to run a git setup. Then it scales really well, as everyone is doing their own thing on their own domains.
Of course, you lose out on some things like ease of user access and various protections.
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The harsh reality, but now it is humans using AI agents which is why we cannot have nice things.
> it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays.
Not just the web either. It feels like the whole world is in a race to throw shit together and cash out as quickly as possible: influencers, hustle culture, enshittification, etc.
My pet theory is that all of the global chaos around the climate, politics, pandemic, etc. is leading people to no longer believe in the future. Once you lose that, all that's left to care about is the right now. No one takes the time to scrimshaw the deckrails on a ship they believe is sinking.
That isn’t it. If you think bad weather and a flu is something to be scared of, try imagining what several thousand hydrogen bombs would do.
Or perhaps another adaptation:
We can; the tide changed to where it is now and can change again - and somebody will change it.
People need to stop bemoaning it, and think and do something. The enshittification is an idiotic, failing, extremely short-sighted strategy.
It's a huge opportunity - your competition has stopped investing in its product, fired its talent, treats its customers with utter contempt, and is managed by imbeciles. Who is a better target for disruption? Hire the talent, market your quality, treat your customers with respect, point out the BS your competition does every time they do it. Stop staring at your navel.
That's the whole point - it's too easy to sit around on HN and bitch about enshittification - which just is enshittification!
We each have to work on our areas of quality - and when everyone starts doing that, the world changes.
> I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it
I think the "ridiculously dramatic" part is the whole love letter to GitHub, not the frustration.
And I think it is fair to say that it is ridiculously dramatic. Which is okay, of course, I'm not criticising here. Just like it would feel ridiculously dramatic (at least to me) if someone explained that they cried today when they stopped their subscription to Netflix in order to move to another service, because they love Netflix so much.
The difference here is _creative_ work vs consumption. Craftspeople like Mitchell feel passionately about the tools they rely on to build. Github has also been a social place for builders.
I don't think it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about great tools rusting or makerspaces closing...
Again, I am not criticising the feeling. It's okay to feel the way we feel.
I am just saying that when Mitchell mentioned it being "ridiculously dramatic", I think he was not talking about the frustration but rather about the fact that he cried about leaving GitHub.
It's okay to feel sad about something and to also feel that it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about it.
Thanks for the downvotes though.
Way overcomplicating design is one challenge that keeps getting worse.
Another gigantic unspoken issue is that people have started building tons of stuff with React on purpose for some reason.
I'm so tired of this idiotic take that I've decided to create and publish a new React app every time I see it on HN.
React gets blamed for this because the error handling is bad and the UX is confusing. But the issue with GitHub’s frontend is that the backend is dropping requests. When you click a button on GitHub and the loader gets stuck that’s because there no timeout/error handling in the JavaScript but there also no reply from the server. I feel like React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.
> React gets blamed for this because the error handling is bad and the UX is confusing
Yes, it does.
> React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.
Two things can be bad! Except that in this case one of them is unnecessarily bad, because nobody forced them to use a front end system which defaults to terrible failure handling.
This is surprising to me, I would have bet money that all the people who actively engage in this type of language/framework war discourse were all drawing Social Security by now.
There's a big difference between a war between two somewhat equivalent things that make different choices (editor wars, language wars, etc.) vs pointing out that certain things are really fundamentally ... not good. IMO we all need to be much louder and clearer about how bad things are, and how much better they could be.
This is, in fact, on topic: github actions seemed to me like a bad idea from the start, to me, but I let my co-workers and "network effects" convince me that I was being grumpy and that it was fine, and so we've adopted it. And now ... here we are. It was exactly as bad I thought it was, and it reflected a broken engineering culture.
Enshittification has become the winning strategy for companies. If you don’t enshittify you will lose.
Fully agree. We really should punish companies that blatantly push this kind of mercenarism. I mean, every VP and CxO join a company, he/she takes super short-sighted decisions that push some random metric a bit up, and then they leave with a huge performance bonus not caring if everything is worse. They won't be around to cope with the fallout as they are already in another company doing the same.
I am not again performance bonuses, but they should be attach to better metrics. Eg the number of happy users is still up in 3 years time. Or something like this.
GitHub didn't have a CTO until 2017. Vlad Federov only started in 2024.
This is my darkly optimistic take on enshittification:
Companies know how to make good product, but if they don't have "new and shiny" to impress us anymore, then their only alternative is to make things worse so they can heel turn and then make things "better" by unmaking all of the worse things they did.
They can also milk their customers coming and going in the process.
It's not "enshittify or lose", its just raw greed. Things will get better again, either that or a competitor will destroy them. Enshittification is just the current meta and a new one will come soon enough.
I don't think companies know how to make a good product any more. Conway's law won this battle.
I think it's that company management has no incentive to do well. So they have no reason to push this down to the bottom tier of workers who actually make the products. The feedback loop is open. They make an order, the product gets worse, the line goes up, they don't know the product got worse and they have no reason to care anyway.
Slop didn't start with AI.
The West already forgot how to manufacture things, and we are now forgetting how to code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907879
When is the "get better" step? I've only ever seen two things happen mid- or post-enshittification:
It's not clear to me why "get shitty" is a necessary step to this. What part of GitHub's executives' grand plan is "have a barely-functional service that randomly prevents people from working"?> What part of GitHub's executives' grand plan is "have a barely-functional service
What about lock-in, being a monopoly? Why wouldn’t you maximize on saving costs? Sure some people leave, but the majority is not going anywhere. And if the platform dies they’ve made more money than to keep it alive.
The enshittification process milks the current product of all of the money that can be wrung from it by any means just shy of immolation.
Companies aren't getting cheap loans right now so they're desperate to juice their stocks so that upper management can secure their bonuses.
That's why "get shitty" is necessary.
When they've wrung it dry, pocketed all of the crumbs of raw cash they can get, then they'll either collapse due to overmilking their products or they'll realize that the only way to refatten the calf is to bring in new customers, so they'll unshittify it for the fresh infusion of customer money.
It's a cycle, and one I predict will inevitably lead to many of these companies' collapse.
> It's not "enshittify or lose"
I think it’s “find natural monopoly and reduce costs (aka enshittify)”.
Github is a natural monopoly and users cannot go anywhere. Unless you’re famous like Mitchell Hashimoto.
Depends on how strong a moat really is, but it can be "enshittify and lose", too. Enlightened (as opposed to short-term) self-interest may pay off after two years or twenty, depending, and in the latter case, it may as well not pay off at all as far as a public company are concerned.
I think Microsoft’s home game is “monopolize and enshittify”. They are the masters and know the exactly what amount of enshittification is too much. E.g. Hashimoto quitting GH is probably totally worth the 10 SREs they fired. Us plebs cannot go anywhere.
But you totally can go somewhere else? E.g GitLab (which is, unfortunately, about as slow as GitHub, but with a better license and owner) or sr.ht.
If you think you need those sweet GitHub stars, I can't help you.
I mean the stars, social features and branding of Github make it more or less a lock-in. You can go somewhere else, but it’s not the same experience.
> If you think you need those sweet GitHub stars, I can't help you.
The majority of users need it.
Why not use GH just as a front page you mirror code. You keep your stars but develop elsewhere, on a server you control.
https://lists.sr.ht/~machocam/public-inbox/%3C46e343ec-c932-...
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It's move fast and break things.
I can't help but think it's a bit more complicated than that.
GitHub back in the day was a healthy version of "Move fast and break things". I wonder what's different.
The idea was, move fast and break things - but then pick them up and fix them. Companies realised they didn't really have to fix them properly as the users still stuck around.
>what in the world is going on?
AI slop code
I disagree. Microsoft had been doing just fine at making completely awful and broken products before AI coding was a thing.
Yes, exactly. AI isn't some magic dust that you can sprinkle into your workforce and get more productivity and better results. It is at best a force amplifier for what you already have. If you're making awful and broken products, you will make even more awful and even more broken products at a higher rate than before.
It's not a coincidence that every impressive result done using AI has come from someone with a track record of impressive results before AI. AI isn't magic. It doesn't make you good at stuff you're bad at.
Microsoft had a very specific niche of making completely awful software that wasn't actually broken - in fact, that was often the infuriating thing.
If it just shat the bed completely, you'd have an easy argument to replace it with something else; instead, it would be technically competent (Hi, Raymond!) but covered in stuff that made it infuriating to use (Hi, Redmond!), especially if you didn't live in it day in and day out.
The .NET team is a counter example, aside from the GUI situation.
I think it's more people are checked out (and AI is one part of it yes), made worse by orgs who don't know how to lead/manage/change effectively.
FWIW, some people used to (or still do) say similar things that software is significantly worse because people use "unserious" languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript. It brought about so much cool shit that I don't think it's worth saying we should've stuck with only C and Java.
I don't know if it's just because I was young and bright eyed, but it seems like the "passionate nerd" is somewhat absent in modern tech orgs. Seems like, starting around 6 years ago, none of the new hires seem to give a fuck about anything anymore.
That's definitely great for work life balance, and I don't think any less of them for that, but passion seems to be gone.
I would be doing what I do for work if I was employed or not. That's how everyone I used to work with was. Now everyone seems to do the minimal, with the goal being more to direct blame than solving neat problems.
I'm still optimistic. I think the number hasn't gone down, just the ratio. Software still offers a relatively well paid and comfortable career, so you naturally get people who just want to do a good job and that's it. Nothing wrong with that.
Used to be nerds hanging out on IRC, distributing Slackware, hacking trialware, modding games, etc. that had the passion and problem solving determination to do software work, which used to be harder due to lack of access to information.
OTOH what a great time for a budding engineer. I'm in my mid 30s, and no longer have the same stamina and passion as in my teenage/20s, but in the last 5 years I've learnt so many things I could not have done so back in the day. I learnt and experimented way more around random topics like compilers, OS, electronics, databases because of ease of access to information, AI (:shrug:), even though I have way less free time.
Github is going around boasting how many PRs they generate a day with Copilot with very limited human input. Whether that's true or not, it might have effect.
Deeper than that, but likely also that.
CV-driven development, a treadmill of features nobody needs that hurts stability we do need.
When did every company become a feature factory? Was tech ever not like this, or is it just how it works? It seems like they all end up this way, and it's really dumb.
Software always was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law
Hardware, I don't know. Possibly always was too, I think even non-tech hardware was pushing more features as an excuse for shorter product lives back around the Great Depression, give or take a decade.
Managers now try to "extract value" quickly, leaving ruins behind them and not caring about the future as the immediate payouts allow them to stick to the "F*k you, I got mine!" paradigm.
It's slop from both sides, they're pretty obviously slopping their move to Azure, and at the same time being slammed with a Cambrian explosion of slop repositories.
Too bad it's not reminiscent of the Hotmail purchase where they tried to move off the BSD servers and ended up with new accounts on the relatively unreliable Windows-based setup, and old accounts routed to the original BSDs.
AI slop is downstream of enshittification
>The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on?
Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era? Segfault everywhere, "fatal error was successful", kernel panic, BSOD, screen freeze for any reason and its opposite.
Nothing serves better good all time than bad memory as they say.
Not that the gigabit of useless crap to show essentially a few ko of text is fine, but the abuses and horrors that humans commit just shifted a bit where they land, it's not like there was a time were we had a land free of human dirty stuffs.
> Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era?
I take it you're agreeing with the sentiment since you had to go back 40-50 years to make your point.
Yes somehow, in a the sense that there are always things that we can observe as annoying when the representation of a situation where these issues are not present is easy to fantasize. But making actually disappear these annoyances is the hard part, plus the new situation have great chances to be bound to different annoyances that phantasms didn't anticipate. So the NP hard problem is being critique of our anticipations to try to avoid paths to bigger troubles, and keep steady effort on waking the path all while also paying attention to current sensory feedbacks of the situation on the road.
(Needless) complexity is going on.
KISS and you sleep better.
That and the problem of forever chasing trends and never saying: "It's done" without reinventing everything every couple of years (trends again)
Sounds too easy? It is of course simplified, but the core still holds true.
GitHub just worked, but they had to migrate to React because "that's what everyone else uses"... Pure Enshittification.
After yesterday's outage they admitted that their elasticsearch index for issues/prs lost data.
They seem to have changed the primary source of data in the issues and pull requests tabs (w/o filters applied) from the underlying database to the elasticsearch search index, which has the side effect that there's a noticeable delay between state change of an issue/pr and an update in the UI. But as seen today, these can get out of sync, and apparently they even had data loss in the index.
I would really like to know their reasoning for making that change. I can totally imagine that they wanted to "simplify" so the UI uses only a single data source instead of two.
As a user it's incredibly annoying to have a delay between issue/pr state changes and the search index picking it up.
Yeah, I have been noticing weird things with Issues and PRs, including outdated state, for months now.
When the outage happened yesterday I sort of figured it was something I had been noticing building up or something.
What? React has nothing to do with current state of affairs. In fact, React on GitHub currently exists in mere islands, i.e. in Projects and recently in Pull Requests. Most of the frontend is still Web Components[1] paired with Turbo[2] for hot reloading. GitHub is still as slow even with JavaScript disabled, try it yourself. Backend just serves stuff really slow. In fact, there is an alternative GitHub frontend (no affiliation) that feels snappier and is written in React.[3]
With that said, Mitchell complains about outages. These started directly after Microsoft acquisition[4] and are attributed to migration from AWS to Azure.
[1] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/ho...
[2] see html source for tags
[3] https://my.githero.app/
[4] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
Pull Requests is the thing that was wacky in the UI yesterday, coincidence or not? I have no idea.
Yesterday we saw PR pages that displayed no error, just displayed wrong info. I would have preferred to get an error page than outdated or empty lists. I was guessing this was related to the React migration but I don't really know.
Also, the browser back and forward buttons no longer work in pull requests when going between PR tabs (commits, checks, files changed, etc) as well as some other site interactions.
Like, what user-hostile intention was the reasoning behind that? I am literally imagining a product manager smoking a cigar and laughing at the RUM session replays of me losing my shit.
I think the backend is just fucked. I have issues with Actions and the API all the time, not just the web UI