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Show HN: Better Hub – A better GitHub experience
Hey HN,
I’m Bereket, founder of Better Auth. Our team spends a huge amount of time on GitHub every day. Like anyone who’s spent enough time there, I’ve always wished for a much better GitHub experience.
I’ve asked a lot of people to do something about it, but it seems like no one is really tackling GitHub directly.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet from Mitchell (HashiCorp) complaining about the repo main page. That became the trigger. I decided to start hacking on a prototype to see how far I could push an alternative interface using GitHub’s APIs.
Within a week, I genuinely started using it as my default, same with the rest of our team. After fixing a few rough edges, I decided to put it out there.
A few things we’re trying to achieve:
- UI/UX rethink* – A redesigned repo home, PR review flow, and overview pages focused on signal over noise. Faster navigation and clearer structure.
- Keyboard-first workflow: ⌘K-driven command center, ⌘/ for global search, ⌘I opens “Ghost,” an AI assistant, and more.
- Better AI integration: Context-aware AI that understands the repo, the PR you’re viewing, and the diff you’re looking at.
- New concepts: Prompt Requests, self-healing CI, auto-merge with automatic conflict resolution, etc.
It’s a simple Next.js server talking to the GitHub API, with heavy caching and local state management.
We’re considering optional git hosting (in collaboration with teams building alternative backends), but for now, the experiment is: how much can we improve without replacing GitHub
This is ambitious and very early. The goal is to explore what a more modern code collaboration experience could look like, and make it something we can all collaborate on.
I’d love your feedback on what you think should be improved about GitHub overall.
- trvz 7mo ago[flagged]
- junon 7mo agoWhat a weird thing to get hung up on.
- randomtoast 7mo agoBut it is not an em dash.
- tonytamps 7mo agoif this is your evaluation criteria for products I wish you the best.
- trvz 7mo agoYes. You can’t audit code, but you can estimate its quality by other decisions such as this.
- avocadosword 7mo agoI think that Better Auth (www.better-auth.com) might have been an inspiration for the name here
- bregma 7mo agoIt's a minus sign not a dash. You're just focusing on the negative.
- TheDong 7mo agoYeah, I had to switch dictionaries once I found Webster's url: https://www.merriam-webster.com/ https://www.merriam-webster.com/
- nik736 7mo agoNo lightmode?
- junon 7mo agoYeah I'm a darkmode fan but this is nearly unreadable in the sun
- robtherobber 7mo agoI will never use dark mode if I can avoid it. The idea that it's somehow better is a bit shady [0][1] (save for mobile devices where arguably it may help save some energy), but I absolutely understand that it can be a personal preference. Multiple discussions already exist on HN on this topic, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664079 [0] https://simplyexplained.com/videos/why-dark-mode-makes-you-stupid/ https://simplyexplained.com/videos/why-dark-mode-makes-you-s... [1] https://www.lloydatkinson.net/posts/2024/the-dark-mode-lobby/ https://www.lloydatkinson.net/posts/2024/the-dark-mode-lobby...
- lloydatkinson 7mo agoThanks for sharing my article :)
- robtherobber 7mo agoOf course.
- kjksf 7mo agoThere is one: click top right icon for menu, "Light mode". It does tend to lose it on refresh, which is bad.
- bekacru 7mo agoThere is light mode and you can change themes with cmdk + change theme
- dkdbejwi383 7mo agoThe website doesn't tell me what it does or why it's better. It just wants me to sign-up and provide a bunch of permissions without first selling itself to me. The landing page should clearly communicate what this does and contrast it with GitHub to make it obvious how it's better. I guess the little embedded video might show some of this but it's not very clear. I just see someone faffing about and scrolling up and down randomly.
- figmert 7mo ago> It just wants me to sign-up and provide a bunch of permissions without first selling itself to me. Yes, and including admin access to all your orgs :)
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- 1f60c 7mo agoAs the help text explains, you can tap to select or unselect any permissions beyond the basics. (Which are admittedly still quite broad.) You can also use a PAT but that's already too much friction for me for something like this.
- reactordev 7mo agoJustification of malfeasance is not an excuse.
- sceptic123 7mo agoBut it's okay because > Your access token is encrypted and stored securely. Only the permissions you grant will be used.
- jayfx 7mo agoCame here to say exactly that
- fabmilo 7mo ago
- alejoar 7mo agoYeah I'm not giving you all those permissions. Make it more granular maybe?
- Jacques2Marais 7mo agoI think most of the permissions can be toggled?
- ayhanfuat 7mo ago"Click to toggle optional permissions. Hover the to learn why each is needed."
- alejoar 7mo agoYou are right, I missed that. The text is almost invisible to me though, dark gray over black..
- pulkas 7mo agoyour better make it as chrome extension. And i dont know why you wanted me to give you all my permissions?
- bkolobara 7mo agoThis looks awesome! I remember the Mitchell tweet, it was like a week ago? I'm super impressed how much functionality you managed to push out so fast. Crazy times. And I very much agree with Mitchell that the repository page needs improvement. If it's a public repository I'm exploring, I scroll always down through the files to see the README. If it's a repository I'm maintaining I'm either clicking on commits, PRs or issues. All this information should be right there on the first page! Most of the realestate is occupied by the file view, something I never cared about. I have also been working on improving the experience for myself with https://lubeno.dev https://lubeno.dev, and have been thinking for the last year how GitHub can be improved. I started specifically with Pull Requests, borrowing some ideas from other platforms, like stacked PRs. One feature that I'm very proud of is the possibility to see an interdiff when someone changes the code I commented on. You can instantly tell if the issue was addressed instead of getting an <outdated> tag on the comment and hunting down the latest changes. Would really love to see more innovation when it comes to forges. It looks like GitHub set the standard 20 years ago and everything else is a 1:1 copy of it.
- sebmaynard 7mo agoOn mobile (Firefox android) you can't see the video overview - so I have absolutely no information to go on as to what this is, other than it wants a lot of permissions, and to sign in with my GitHub account.
- faize 7mo agoWould love to give it a try by browsing public repos without the need to sign in and grant all those permissions
- bkolobara 7mo agoI just noticed that you can uncheck permissions before you clicking continue with GitHub, to reduce the scope.
- KolmogorovComp 7mo agoWrite access to public repos is not optional?? As well as full read and write user data?? Flee, far.
- nusl 7mo agoWhy not allow it to be self-hosted or make it a browser extension? Seems cool but I am not gonna trust a random tool with this level of access.
- alex_suzuki 7mo agoCongrats on the launch! Personally I don’t see the appeal of tacking on to a dependency that I’d prefer to get rid of.
- ramon156 7mo agoWould love an ad-hoc alternative frontend similar to NewPipe for YouTube. Would be cool if I could have the same interface as forgejo/codeberg and just pretend its not GH
- dewey 7mo agoI'm not really interested in using it, or giving someone access to my GitHub account but I do hope that something like that will inspire someone at GitHub.
- jraph 7mo agoA better answer to GitHub being bad is probably fleeing GitHub, not working around some of the badness and creating even more dependence on it.
- versecafe 7mo agoIt's a huge technical commitment just to get the basics off the ground but if you're interested in something like that in very early stages is https://app.gitcafe.dev/ https://app.gitcafe.dev/ with a few public repos like - https://app.gitcafe.dev/versecafe/webls https://app.gitcafe.dev/versecafe/webls - https://app.gitcafe.dev/nektro/zigmod https://app.gitcafe.dev/nektro/zigmod - https://app.gitcafe.dev/risky/emailthing https://app.gitcafe.dev/risky/emailthing
- cgfjtynzdrfht 7mo ago[dead]
- theturtletalks 7mo agoHere's the repo: https://github.com/better-auth/better-hub https://github.com/better-auth/better-hub Looks interesting but also, they are saving everything to a database. It's not simply an alternative frontend for Github akin Nitter or NewPipe (for Twitter and TY respectively).
- egeres 7mo agoIf it's an open source project the landing page should have a direct link to it so that developers can get a broader sense of what this product is
- monster_truck 7mo agoThis is insanity, I'm not giving some random app these permissions
- esskay 7mo agoHaving a vibe coded app (openclaw) being in the header promo image was enough to nope me out of even thinking about it. This is vibe coded slop. Why on earth would I give that access to my github account.
- ezekg 7mo agoI think you'd have a better reaction if you allowed some public repos to be viewed before handing over the keys to the castle, so to speak. Even better would be allowing a public repo to preview itself via better-hub.com/{org}/{repo} would be slick. Expensive for you, but might help onboarding. As it stands, the call to action is poor, so unfortunately there's no way I'm going to login with GitHub and give a bunch of permissions to a new app posted on HN, no matter who built it.