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I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say). Nobody should

• chanux 5mo ago
  Here's the track for this moment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuNyMxLlVig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuNyMxLlVig :)
• teach 5mo ago
  Anyone who makes fun of you for feeling things probably isn't anyone you want to listen to, anyway. Thanks for being human and making ergonomic software for humans.
• DrammBA 5mo ago
  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?
  • lpcvoid 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • ben_w 5mo ago
      Deeper than that, but likely also that. CV-driven development, a treadmill of features nobody needs that hurts stability we do need.
      • jcgrillo 5mo ago
        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.
        • ben_w 5mo ago
          Software always was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law 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.
    • weiliddat 5mo ago
      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.
      • nomel 5mo ago
        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.
  • OtomotO 5mo ago
    (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.
    • stabbles 5mo ago
      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.
      • jrochkind1 5mo ago
        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.
    • SoKamil 5mo ago
      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/how-we-use-web-components-at-github/ https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/ho... [2] see html source for tags [3] https://my.githero.app/ https://my.githero.app/ [4] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/ https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
  • realo 5mo ago
    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.
    • rvz 5mo ago
      The harsh reality, but now it is humans using AI agents which is why we cannot have nice things.
    • osigurdson 5mo ago
      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.
      • a1o 5mo ago
        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.
      • bavell 5mo ago
        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?
        • pocksuppet 5mo ago
          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.
  • frevib 5mo ago
    Enshittification has become the winning strategy for companies. If you don’t enshittify you will lose.
    • BizarroLand 5mo ago
      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.
      • frevib 5mo ago
        > 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.
        • ahartmetz 5mo ago
          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.
          • frevib 5mo ago
            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.
  • ngruhn 5mo ago
    It's move fast and break things.
    • butterlesstoast 5mo ago
      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.
      • weavie 5mo ago
        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.
  • Induane 5mo ago
    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.
    • pc86 5mo ago
      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.
      • 12_throw_away 5mo ago
        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.
        • DangitBobby 5mo ago
          That's what I've been saying this whole time! My hatred of Vim isn't a preference, vim is just fundamentally "not good"! Finally an intellectual.
        • pc86 5mo ago
          It is certainly possible that you are brilliant and your co-workers and the industry writ large are all morons. That you were right all along, and chickens roosting and all that, though it seems at least equally as likely that this is not the case.
          • 12_throw_away 5mo ago
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • palata 5mo ago
    > 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.
    • nicr_22 5mo ago
      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...
      • palata 5mo ago
        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.
  • munificent 5mo ago
    > 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.
    • bombcar 5mo ago
      And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. We can't really change the tide lest we be King Cnut - but we can at least take the time and effort in the things we do to fight against entropy - bring more order and durability into our lives. Or perhaps another adaptation: God, grant me the serenity to accept the enshittification I cannot change the courage to improve the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
      • mmooss 5mo ago
        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.
        • bombcar 5mo ago
          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.
  • psychoslave 5mo ago
    >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.
    • DrammBA 5mo ago
      > 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.
      • psychoslave 5mo ago
        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.
• piker 5mo ago
  Do you think this is endemic to large software organizations today, or are our needs (and the corresponding complexity) just outstripping the ability of old business models to address it?
• aapoalas 5mo ago
  "They're your feelings and no one else has the right to how you should feel about them."
• steve_adams_86 5mo ago
  I find the decline of these things upsetting too. I don't know if it slots into enshittification specifically, but there's a phenomenon of decline in general that's so antithetical to where my career began and what I thought was possible. I want to believe we can do better, and ideals can still matter in software. And I mean, they clearly can; your own contributions are proof of that. We can all do better and the decline isn't a prescription we all need to follow. Regardless, it's tough to watch. Github used to be such an exciting and promising platform.
• fourside 5mo ago
  People who reach outlier-level success in a field tend to have strong opinions and an emotional connection to said field. It’s probably a non-trivial part of why they are so successful.
• bayindirh 5mo ago
  > I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say). No, it's not. There are things we like/love in our life, and we rightfully get sad when things go bad in the camps we like, support. > I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way. I personally won't and will be angry to the people who do. Been there, done that for different things. We're human, this is normal. For finding their way, I can't be that optimistic, unfortunately. Sorry about that.
• pdimitar 5mo ago
  Whoever makes fun of you over it is exactly the people you want to avoid. Leaving any emotions aside, all the arguments you gave are technical and carry weight: we are not always in the mood for OSS work -- or even have the time and energy, which happens to be the much more oft limitation -- and when we are, we want our infra to just work. If it does not, that might kill your motivation for a week. Or a month. For an OSS contributor, the main one even, this is actually bad news. You are doing both yourself and your community a big service by making this difficult decision. Not everyone can do it. Respect.
• klaussilveira 5mo ago
  I don't think it is dramatic. I felt a similar sadness around this subject. It's the meaning behind it: the hacker spirit, the naive curiosity, the juveline freedom, being destroyed by the corporate machine. It is a small metaphor that hits all of us in different spots. And boy, does it hurt.
• rtaylorgarlock 5mo ago
  Wow, thanks for your honesty here. I'm commenting primarily to commend your decision-making which I couch in empathetic understanding. I saw your post and immediately thought, "good, surprised it took {any organization leaving github} this long." I don't hate big M nor the 'github ecosystem' (except maybe github actions, which seems to get 10x the attention it deserves); the challenge is I perceive far better solutions to be chosen which would serve the open source world if we simply deploy a slight increase in cognitive energy.
• noir_lord 5mo ago
  There isn't inherently wrong with loving a tool or been sad when it it becomes something you can't love anymore, we are tool using monkeys after all - it is perhaps our defining characteristic. I'd be absolute crushed if Linux (for example) morphed into something I could not/no longer wanted to use, part of the reason I use open source wherever I can is because that is less likely to happen, Inkscape is still inkscape nearly 20 years after I started using it, so is Gimp, so is KDE, they've all changed but the essence of them is still the same (so has Linux).
  • pocksuppet 5mo ago
    Gnome. If you liked Gnome 2, by now you're crushed. At least you can use Mate Desktop.
    • bornfreddy 5mo ago
      Well yeah, and there is KDE 3 which was awesome. But for most of the projects their point stands.
  • woolion 5mo ago
    KDE's hard-switch to Wayland broke so many things in my workflows, from what used to be a perfect system. For keyboard expansions espansso/ydotools crash bi-hourly and I couldn't pinpoint the source, clipboard sharing between applications doesn't work anymore, global shortcuts have been limited... The essence is the same, but it is so broken that it has a real productivity impact that will require a lot of effort to correct, and would depend on upstream fixes...
• theideaofcoffee 5mo ago
  Github won't shed a single tear in return, hell, they probably didn't even know until this came out. And not to sound harsh, but they probably don't care either. If they don't 'find their way', then there are 10 different competitors ready to take over, and I hope some of them do. Better for the ecosystem to have a strong element of competition. Perhaps their time as top dog is ending, and it's only natural, nothing lasts forever, especially in tech.
• saadn92 5mo ago
  Nothing stupid about caring deeply about tools that shaped your career. GitHub wasn't just a SaaS for a lot of us it was where we learned to build. The fact that you're emotional about it says more about how much you gave to that platform than anything else. Ghostty will be fine wherever it lives because people follow the project and not where it's hosted. Best of luck!
  • ssgodderidge 5mo ago
    So true! This quote from the blog post really hit me: > Since then, I've opened GitHub every single day. Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years. Over half my life. A handful of exceptions in there (I'd love to see the data), but I can't imagine more than a week per year How could you not feel this way about a tool you willingly use this much? Perhaps if your employer is forcing you to use it, its different. But maintaining OSS? that's a labor of love. How could you not get emotional?
• rvz 5mo ago
  Damn GitHub is at a new low. I wish GitHub wasn't overtaken by the AI agents and hoped that the situation would improve. But it just didn't and ever since Microsoft took it over, it was just run into the ground. I thought that GitHub was so unreliable that it would be better to self host instead of use the service [0]. It turns out that 6 years later, that was the case and it doesn't sound crazy anymore. The problem is GitHub was neglected and the AI agents ran it into the ground and we need to now self host. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406
• jadbox 5mo ago
  What OSS friendly platform will you be moving to?
• dantihanyi 5mo ago
  It's a fair writeup and your thoughts are valid. Businesses have to continue to re-earn customer trust each year - especially when it's mission critical and they expect recurring revenue. I hope they find their way too. If you're still considering vendors, I think you'll find some of the keep it simple ethos can still be found among OSS friendly vendors -- Codeberg, etc. Good quality & uptime doesn't have to be expensive - just grounded by people that care enough to reject the scope creep and focus on doing one thing well.
• ziml77 5mo ago
  You feel how you feel and that's totally fine.
• Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
  > Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know. Mitchell, when I was in 10th grade and had to pick my streams which led me to pick comp-sci/stem rather than finance (I am going to college soon), I thought of my dream life and it was being on a vacation/beach using Linux or terminals and opening github and contributing to open source software. I simply couldn't imagine my life without terminal (funny because ghostty is the terminal that I use) You said that you have been with Github for 18 years, that is longer than the time I have been on earth. You were (and in some sense are!) living my dream life in that sense and github fulfilled its role, it had helped you until recently when it has started to get worse and worse. my point is you have an special bond with github and for good reason,so to remove an somewhat integral part of all of this (github) after so long will have emotional feelings and outbursts. I hope that you are doing fine, Ghostty/your-work has a positive impact on my life and gives a hope by being a relaible tool I rely on, I wish nothing but the best for Ghostty and you personally.
• idan 5mo ago
  Hi there! Longtime fan and hubber here. It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there's ~180m GH accounts nowadays) My version of your post reads differently: "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" Walking away would be easy. I felt that way when I left Heroku ~six years ago. I left that job and never opened the Heroku dashboard again, after nearly a decade of happy use. I felt that it was irredeemable, and though it took a while, Salesforce did eventually succeed in running it fully into the ground. I don't feel the same about GitHub. It is precisely because it's precious that I can't walk away. I'm not the only one here who feels that way. In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. But none of it feels like the Heroku/Salesforce debacle. Occam's razor applies here: it's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale, and a fundamental shift of the ground under all of our feet. I hope we do the things that will make you want to come back. I hope we spark that joy in you again! It's not stupid to have big feelings about something that is so central to our lives as developers. Fuck that noise.
  • sourcegrift 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • rmunn 5mo ago
      First, a reminder of the guidelines: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." Second, even if your comment was not an attempt to do ideological battle: neither the comment you replied to, nor the post linked, mentioned any pronouns, so your comment makes no sense. (Well, the comment you replied to used the pronouns I, we, and you, but first- and second-person pronouns are ungendered in the English language, so if that was what you were referring to then your comment still would make no sense). Were you trying to leave this on a different message?
      • 5mo ago
• NewJazz 5mo ago
  Spool of Wire Guy or Wiregate refers to a viral video of a man (named Dan) telling his wife (Cindy) that a spool of wire he's had for 40 years is almost at its end The spool of wire became a prominent metaphor on the app, representing something that might seem meaningless to others, but holds sentimental and nostalgic value to its owner. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spool-of-wire-guy https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spool-of-wire-guy
  • satvikpendem 5mo ago
    I do recall this meme and I empathize with him and also Mitchell above. It's annoying for people to not understand your feelings or make fun of them especially if they're reflections on years past.
  • ale 5mo ago
    Damn
• oulipo2 5mo ago
  Tools can be frustrating. We can get emotional with tools we appreciate and we grew up with. But we should also learn to not focus solely on work efficiency. As you say yourself, this is unhealthy. You've labeled it, now work on fixing that unhealthy relationship with work, and with that tool. Nobody should be in an emotional turmoil because they can't do a PR in a 2h window during a day. We should all learn to take things more slowly, because our current accelerationist society is detroying the planet, and is destroying social ties. Because, if you get that emotional from on a non-functioning tool... wait until you discover how our non-functioning democracies allowed for a genocide to happen in Gaza, for people in the south to be doing slave-work for our AIs to satifsy people in the north, etc
• denysvitali 5mo ago
  > Nobody should cry over a SaaS This is more than a SaaS, for you and the others. Stating kind of the obvious: without it Vagrant, Terraform and heck, even Hashicorp would have not been the same - or probably even existed. Despite probably being a later user of GitHub I share the same feelings. It's so sad to see GitHub, a product and company I once respected a lot, getting trashed by Microsoft and all of these outages.
• flowardnut 5mo ago
  "Lately, I've been very publicly critical of GitHub. I've been mean about it. I've been angry about it. I've hurt people's feelings. I've been lashing out. Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is irrationally personal. I love GitHub more than a person should love a thing, and I'm mad at it. I'm sorry about the hurt feelings to the people working on it." Same :( their 9 5's is embarassing
• WesolyKubeczek 5mo ago
  If you choose something self-hostable (whether hosted commercially for you or no is of no relevance), I'm very interested to hear about it.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• Zenbit_UX 5mo ago
  Forgive me if you’re not in a solutioning phase right now … but how motivated are you to fix this? I’m a big fan of ghostty and also unenamoured with the current state of GitHub and Microsoft. That is to say I believe this is an opportunity to disrupt the incumbent player and I’m game. HMU if you feel similar and want to discuss.
• rajangdavis 5mo ago
  Throwing out this idea, but would you ever consider making your own version of Github?
• _doctor_love 5mo ago
  > I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say). > I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. Brother, it is not a stupid thing. We need more in the world of what you are doing here. Never change on this count.
• koolala 5mo ago
  God would cry too if they saw the world they created. Let the salty tears flow
  • jenadine 5mo ago
    So far everything is going according to the plan. Humans are really close to make the AI that will replace them and enter into the next phase of the plan. Or do you have a better idea of what the plan exactly is?
    • koolala 5mo ago
      You mean the AI that might fail and suck every last ounce of entropy or life out the planet and sufficate it? Have you seen the insane amount of natural gas being burned to power it? Obviously I'd love if AI solved its own energy crisis but that hasn't even begun to happen yet. You think it will invent cold fusion? Room temp super conductors? Solar cells past our theoretical limits? Do you realize it's literally being controlled by human greed?
      • koolala 5mo ago
        It isn't just greed controlling it too, so I'm also optimistic. I'd just also like seeing the light powering it at the beginning of the tunnel.
      • pocksuppet 5mo ago
        It's not going to do any of these things, because it's auto-complete. No, it won't bypass P≠NP either.
        • koolala 5mo ago
          What about P vs. NP? Is auto-complete able to create P solutions and then perform NP verification by interacting with experiment or calculation IO? Couldn't it test solutions faster than a human on problems with massive solution spaces like folding proteins or aligning electron-hole pairs?
• dismalaf 5mo ago
  GitHub died when MS bought it. It was great back in the day, it shaped a lot of modern day FOSS culture but now it's just MS.
• heliumtera 5mo ago
  No serious person would make fun of this emotional reaction. It seems technology had something going on, and it quickly got flooded by incompetence and greed. We have all been deeply involved, constructed careers and sharpened our tools with technology and hopefully for the benefit of technology. I can only imagine how deeply sad the current state of software is for those talented individuals that helped to carry it to here. Some of us can at least hide it with cynicism because there is not much at stake, but emotional honesty is very much appreciated.
• aucisson_masque 5mo ago
  I don't know why but I don't want to make fun of you. Just sad you can't enjoy it anymore.
• Dinux 5mo ago
  No man, I'm with you. I remember when GitHub was a joy to use. Finding new niche tools and projects written by people who actually cared about their work. Needed some simple postgres backup script? Browser GitHub and plenty of people put time and effort in creating something that actually worked. I was talking about the same thing just yesterday. GitHub with its friendly mascot is no longer. It's now just another SaaS platform that everyone including my non technical colleagues are using. Their push towards everything-AI is the exact opposite of what they stood for in the begining. A community of like minded people who wanted to build great tools and loved software. But yet no longer. GitHub now feels like a soulless SaaS that's trying to hook my onto an enterprise subscription and bring my whole team along so we can all do some agentic coding or whatever.
• flaburgan 5mo ago
  I feel you mate. When people were scrolling Facebook, I was scrolling github, being so excited to see so many people building things together. Commits popping up in my stream were making me feel we were improving the world, bit by bit. It was an happy stream, compared to the depressing stream of Facebook. And then Microsoft bought github. And I knew it would only be a matter of time before it would fell down. It also made little sense to build all our beloved open source projects in the living room of the entity who was so harmful to our community for years. So I left github and joined several gitlabs. But I never found back this central steam of "look at open source being made in real time". We need a decentralized gitlab with ActivityPub.
• johnbarron 5mo ago
  This post reminds me of Linus video on Git, calling Subversion the most stupid project because it was.... Centralized. ;-) "Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 "I'm not going to force you to switch over to decentralized, I'm just going to call you ugly and stupid. That's the deal."
• anildash 5mo ago
  It's good to care about these choices. There are also lots of ethical reasons to leave GitHub, and this makes it easier for people to choose to leave on those grounds, too. Every time people talk about their decisions and normalize anything that's not just having a monoculture where there are no competitive markets and monopolists control entire ecosystems, that's a good thing.
• deadfall23 5mo ago
  Hey bud, thanks for the honesty and I feel your pain! You're an incredible engineer and I've looked up to you (even though we are the same age) since hanging out at Kiip. Our tools should be getting better not worse. Hopefully your influence can be a canary in the coal mine to make some real change to reliability. -D
• ozim 5mo ago
  I wasn’t that invested in StackOverflow but still I was quite invested there. I do feel kind of sadness right now it is a zombie that current owners are just pumping out whatever is left out of it. I don’t care about GH I felt centralized repositories like that is wrong. Q/A was supposed to be centralized because we need people to find the questions and answers in a single place. GH or others should be just referring to repositories not keep them… be a search engine for decentralized repositories.
• munificent 5mo ago
  > Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. We don't cry over things, we cry over what things mean. I don't see anything wrong with grieving the loss of a community and environment that led to so many meaningful experiences for you.
• singingtoday 5mo ago
  hug Thank you for your hard work.
• 999900000999 5mo ago
  I feel this way, although less emotional, with Unity. Unity taught me how to program and , along with JavaScript turned me from a college dropout to a software engineer. Finished my degree later. I still love Unity, but the company is stable. If I friend needs help with a Unity project, I'm down, but I start all my new games with Godot. I'm not sad though. Unity is like a friend I'm still cool with, we just drifted apart. But from a realistic point of view. Did we really think Unity and GitHub were charities in pursuit of the greater good. Of course not. They cashed out, made money and whatever good they did along the way was a nice side effect.
• linsomniac 5mo ago
  Dramatic or not, it needed to be said and I appreciate you saying it. Nobody would listen if I said it. ;-)
• ok_dad 5mo ago
  I think people today think that compartmentalization is easy but sometimes in life your work and personal life and everything else gets all mixed up and you get situations where others might call it unhealthy but for you, it’s fine ante it’s how you want to live your life. That’s just to say that crying over GitHub is fine, you’re a human, we cry over all sorts of stuff. Emotions are weird and you should not feel badly for having them.
• bavell 5mo ago
  In a reductive sense, yeah it's a bit silly. But zooming out, I can understand. Sucks to have your hand forced. Sucks to be let down. Sucks to watch something that was great fall from grace. Thanks for Ghostty, been my daily driver for awhile now. Hope the rest of your day/week goes much better!
• bagxrvxpepzn 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • motoxpro 5mo ago
    This is not good intentioned, you're a jerk, and it's 100% fine (and healthy) to care about things in life.
    • bagxrvxpepzn 5mo ago
      > This is not good intentioned On what are you basing that? > it's 100% fine (and healthy) to care about things in life. Yes it is and I didn't claim it wasn't, so this is a strawman. There's nothing personally indicting about having low testosterone. It's relatively common and it's potentially a serious medical condition. There is no reason to take offense from this.
      • motoxpro 5mo ago
        Becuase you're associating their reaction to "a serious medical condition" because it is "not normal." I wanted to add a counter to that and say they are very normal and support them rather than suggest they go to the doctor. My assessment of your intentions was wrong, as I can't know that, but I stand by the other two statements.
        • Rapzid 5mo ago
          > Becuase you're associating their reaction to "a serious medical condition" because it is "not normal." Weak man argument. They said low T is "potentially" a serious condition.
        • bagxrvxpepzn 5mo ago
          > I wanted to add a counter to that and say they are very normal and support them rather than suggest they go to the doctor. I don't see a reason to counter anything I said. I offered neutral information that may help the OP. If the OP's testosterone levels are indeed low due to a serious medical condition, then you've just done them a major disservice. Even if you're of the opinion that it's normal, it's reasonable for someone else to assess that feeling sadness to the degree of provoking tears in response to deciding not to use productivity software is a cause for concern.
• subhobroto 5mo ago
  You have been a tremendous influence on my professional life. Vagrant made VMs easy to use. You were very gentle with my Vagrant PRs. We disagreed a bit and I migrated some of those rejected Vagrant PRs into VeeWee. Then Hashicorp happened and I was over the moon. (Full transparency - not everything was perfect, I lost 50% of my Hashicorp equity which hurt real bad but that's not your fault, just saying there were ups and downs!) This is all to say I have tremendous respect for you. Which is why I say: You also have the resources to fix this. You not only have the resources and skill Mitchell, to make it happen - You know everything that it takes to be the CEO of a Billion dollar unicorn - you have the connections, you have the vision. More importantly, Mitchell, you care. Make it happen. You have done it a few times before. Do it again.
• esafak 5mo ago
  > GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better Quote the opposite. We need to leave so they receive the message in order to fix it. As far as the suits know, life is swell. So much so they can't keep up with demand. Be sure to say why you are leaving too, so they know what to fix.
• bittlesnet 5mo ago
  Bud. Right decision. Time is a forward moving arrow. You gotta do what's right for the project and over the years I've rarely seen your decisions going against the stream.
• DetroitThrow 5mo ago
  It's not a stupid thing - GitHub not being serious about basic reliability is, at this point, a big risk to people depending on it for change management, much less OSS projects needing it to do every aspect of work in the public. GitHub made working in the open a joy. It's very sad the state that it's in.
• aforwardslash 5mo ago
  We all understand that. We had some piece of software we still cling on to it (in my case is a copy of paint shop pro 5, corel draw 7 and Delphi 7), despite being completely obsoleted or assassinated by "big industry". I could add CoolEdit 2000 to it, but havent really opened it in a decade. To be honest, I never understood the fascination with github. Its a hub, of git repos. Not to piss on your parade, because your complaints are valid, but maybe isnt github that as gone sour as much as you have grown out of it. This was your passion, now its over and you move on.
• idebug 5mo ago
  I'm sure others have probably said this, but I'll say it anyways. Give Gitea a try. This is what I do. I self-host all my projects and mirror them to Github if they are public projects. And I have distributed Gitea runners across my various servers and they just work and my pipelines never fail me. I'd also highly recommend GitLab CE for similar reasons. But, if you really don't want to self-host, GitLab proper is also awesome and way better than GitHub IMO.
• listless 5mo ago
  I felt pangs of emotion reading the post so it’s definitely not just you. I think because GitHub has been such an important part of my life dating back to the very start of my career - just like you. And it’s not just the technology, it’s the people. All the great projects there. The countless README’s I’ve dissected trying to setup something new. There’s people behind all of that and that always felt exceptionally meaningful to me. It has been profoundly emotional to watch GitHub degrade over the past year. It’s almost like watching someone you love slip away. Which I have also done. It’s not the same, but there is something familiar in the pain. Meanwhile streamers dunk on it in YouTube videos and on X and none of it is funny to me. It’s just tragic. Now I’m choked up. Dammit all to hell.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• ianpenney 5mo ago
  I don’t know if you remember but we met at cfgmgmtcamp in 2016. https://imgur.com/a/auPVRuq https://imgur.com/a/auPVRuq We weren’t even in the same circles and this was my first good conference, but my own little company that I worked at was full of motivated hackers that were trying to wrap our heads around what you already understood. You took my comments about on-boarding and documentation very humbly and you knew what I was really saying was: keep it up. You sure did keep it up. Those same team mates are here with me using TF at a different company years later, and we’re still pushing left. Those colleagues just said “it’s art and science” … and when the art gets ripped away from you, what you described is a natural reaction. Still, keep it up.
• devy 5mo ago
  I am an early GitHub user with low 6 digit user ID (joined around 2011 with a two letter handle). I approve Mitchell's message. It's been painful to use GitHub these days, user experience practically went down the toilet with ridiculous pains like CVEs [1][2], slow and ineffective and expensive GitHub Actions that doesn't allow local execution instead a "push & pray" workflow leading to repetitive "commit-push-wait" cycles to debug CI errors or bugs and then the absolutely horrendous Arkose Lab's Octocaptcha[3][4]. Note that only new users are encountering the Octocaptcha at account creation time, the amount of the time I wasted on solving these ridiculous visual or audio captchas are insane. I happened to need to create 3 separate accounts for the orgs that I am consulting for recently, each time it was at least 20-30 minutes to go through the account creation process. Sure it blocks some AI bots, but can't GitHub team create something that doesn't hinder the user experience?! Oh, if you have uBlock Origin or Privacy Guard on (which I did), it will take longer because each failed answer will set you back for another 5-10 mins of puzzle time! Plus the reliability issues that Mitchell mentioned. Mona the Octocat jumped the shark in 2026. RIP. [1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/github-rce-vulnerability-cve-2026-3854 https://www.wiz.io/blog/github-rce-vulnerability-cve-2026-38... [2] https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/trivy-security-scanner-github-actions.html https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/trivy-security-scanner-git... [3] https://octocaptcha.com https://octocaptcha.com [4] https://share.google/aimode/2KOowSozTuZJVhBLw https://share.google/aimode/2KOowSozTuZJVhBLw
• xyst 5mo ago
  the acquisition by microslop was the death knell for gh.
• fatata123 5mo ago
  [dead]
• thangalin 5mo ago
  > I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way. I jumped ship as soon as they added MFA. I vibe-coded my own raw Git repository reader to help consolidate my other repos (BitBucket, GitLab), which inevitably started to impose more restrictions (disk space, MFA), as well. It's no GitHub, but works, doesn't cache, and is pure PHP. https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek
• 0x0000000 5mo ago
  > I have an unhealthy relationship with it. You really, really do. Please, for your own benefit, take a step back and touch grass, literally. There is so much more to this world than Github of all things. > Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years... During my honeymoon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub This is addiction
  • bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    Yeah I agree. I'm not going to pick on someone for having an unhealthy relationship with a product such that they get weepy when it goes downhill. But I do hope he recognizes how unhealthy it is, and works to improve that.
• napolux 5mo ago
  we can be ai-powered, we can be engineers. but most of all we’re humans :) happy to see that some humans can still feel emotions, real emotions, and not be ashamed by them.
• Nate75Sanders 5mo ago
  Completely understand the work/life/hobby fusion. And I think that you and GitHub went through the stages of life together. They probably weren't exactly parallel, but I bet you measure and remember your life through GitHub's life to some degree, along with the projects you had there. There's no question that with your drive and acumen that you could build the GitHub that you both had and want. It might be your next chapter.
• bfivyvysj 5mo ago
  Is this you moving a git repo to another git hosting service?
• crossroadsguy 5mo ago
  > tears hit my keyboard That is indeed a dangerous slip. I hope yours wasn't an Apple machine. Warranty might be an issue, because even if just one key got soiled, they will propose you should replace "practically" the entire machine (or rather make you; because well, replacing just that exact part that was damaged would be less expensive and hence less efficient and environmentally unfriendly). On the other hand, not at all ridiculous; dramatic yes. I almost felt sad when Orkut shut down. Almost. And around the time XMPP/Jabber stopped being like email when Google/Fb pulled the plug. Can't remember whether it was at the same time. I became numb to such fast and slow metamorphoses a long time ago and I feel sad about this numbness. It's a forced cynicism I'd say. These are such inane corporate events/changes and yet these are so deeply embedded in our lives. Without check and any power over them. So perpetual cynicism works. PS. I really found Ghostty to be cool (and fast!). Sadly, I reverted to stock Terminal, not because Terminal is as good, but because I no longer have/had much terminal usage (until I get back to work/coding again, and I hear things are happening in the terminal a lot more again with our world's new coding toys, LLMs, and whatnot). I also heard you on a podcast recently, and it was very interesting, and since then, I want to try Ghostty again, without even a real need for it yet.
• justinator 5mo ago
  Bruh you're exceedingly wealthy, you'll get through this.
• jasonkester 5mo ago
  I hope this doesn’t come across as making fun, but it had never occurred to me that GitHub could be anything more than a tool for hosting my source code. So if you had written this same piece about all the good times you’d had in Windows Explorer, I’d be no less confused. Can I ask what was there that made you visit the site for anything other than reviewing pull requests and issues?
  • chapz 5mo ago
    It's probably not GitHub as such, but the associated memories and experiences. You never miss a place, you miss the feeling of happines you had when you were there, or the people you spent time with there. People get emotional over a car, over a house, over a pet... you could argue for everything it's just a car/house/pet... you can get a new one.
    • sevenseacat 5mo ago
      Putting pets in that same category is harsh. Pets are family members, living things that you share a home and good times and experiences with.
• traceroute66 5mo ago
  > I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this To be honest, the blog post is quite a lot of self-indulgent waffle. But I forgive you for that, "each to their own", as they say. What I won't forgive you for is writing such a long blog post and then completely missing the bottom-line. Do not write "I'll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in the coming months". If you're going to make me read such a long blog post, then at least have an answer ready-to-go for the critical question that everybody is going to ask !
  • jappgar 5mo ago
    Better yet don't write the post at all until you actually do something. "I'm going to become a vegetarian" vibes.
  • DrBazza 5mo ago
    I read the post yesterday, and read it again today before commenting, and it's not really self-indulgent waffle. Ghostty might be an open source and free product, but that doesn't mean that Mitchell in particular, that works on it, treats it any differently to how a for-profit company would treat its own software. If you're using a SAAS that offers a product to both companies and individuals with the same feature set, and it's uptime is anything less three-nines, it's not fit for purpose. Frankly, I'm amazed companies aren't walking away and giving the same reasons.
• myst 5mo ago
  Was it the platform or the people? The people would be out there doing things without GitHub and they will be there doing things without GitHub.
• bonoboTP 5mo ago
  I'm a bit lost about the problem. Is it really about crying about outages? I'm aware of enshittification issues in the broader tech field but the post and this comment don't really say what the problem is. If this is supposed to be some kind of signal and wakeup call, more info would help. For context I'm a lightweight Github user for over a decade, mostly putting up personal projects without much collab, and opening issues in other repos when I find bugs, just cloning and forking stuff (mainly in the machine learning community, but also in general Linux tools). For me it works okay enough, compared with the overall landscape of SaaS. I'm not a fan, don't feel any loyalty and my expectations for user abuse from big tech are admittedly pretty abysmal by now. I'm just not seeing what specifically happened with github to trigger this.
  • jobs_throwaway 5mo ago
    > Is it really about crying about outages You mean being affected by the constant outages that make the product literally unusable? If you were doing any serious work with it you might understand.
    • bonoboTP 5mo ago
      Thanks, I thought there was some other kind of flareup recently. This seems like bog standard service provider stuff. When my Vodafone internet connection has a lot of outages, I switch to another ISP. Same here. No need to overdramatize it. Use GitLab or whatever else.
• rafa___ 5mo ago
  Dude, get some help
• lopis 5mo ago
  Your emotions are totally valid, and I can empathize. You fell in love with a community that slowly got eroded away and no longer exists.
• callamdelaney 5mo ago
  I thought you like worked there but with the additional context that you never did, yeah cringe
• pikseladam 5mo ago
  chill dude
• jjkaczor 5mo ago
  Naw I did the same after I got "piled" on at Metafilter a few years back, and after 18-years buttoned my account because I was sick of the toxicity (I am an ancient BBS/usenet guy from decades ago - I can handle "flamewars"). I am pretty "left-leaning" liberal, but the "purity tests", insular nature and extreme "wokeness" that place has turned into has basically ruined it. They have monthly meta discussions/threads on why they are losing attention/participation, yet they don't seem to recognize that they drive people away. Back to Github... I wonder how much of the "enshitification" can be tied to the acquisition and corporatization by Microsoft... (I am going to guess "alot")
• MilkLizard 5mo ago
  I don't have much of an opinion about Github, but I just want to add that your feelings are valid. It is not a stupid thing and I hope nobody is making fun of you for crying over it. Take care.
• hodgesrm 5mo ago
  > I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way. So do I. At the same time, GitHub has evolved into a SPOF for the entire software industry. It badly needs some real competition.
• alper 5mo ago
  The same thing happened to Twitter. All the online properties we used will be gutted and sunsetted eventually. The only thing we can do is move on and slash and burn a new pasture. 18 years is a good run as far as these things go.
  • renegade-otter 5mo ago
    I don't think it's nostalgia or rosy retrospection. The youths never experienced the old, magical internet. All they get is algorithmic hell.
• Forgeties79 5mo ago
  I got kind of emotional when I left Reddit a few years ago during the API drama. Moderating for years, participating for like 15… it’s hard to not feel emotionally invested in that. Sure one could simply say “it’s just a website,” but obviously it’s more than that.
• threethirtytwo 5mo ago
  People will comfort you about your emotions and your tears and then tell you you’re wrong to feel sad about it. They’re lying to you. Your instincts about how you feel are completely correct. The reality is it is a bit irrational to love a saas so much and cry about it. I’ve been using GitHub as long as you and I feel nothing for it. To most people moving off of GitHub is a huge hassle, an annoyance rather than a tragedy. I think the biggest damage is the project visibility. Everything else is more of an annoyance.
• turtlesdown11 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    And everyone else thinks less of you for the fact that you are up in arms over a perfectly harmless word.
• kalcode 5mo ago
  Vagrant I used a lot early on in my career to learn Ruby on Rails in Windows. Thanks a lot for your work!
• gtfothisplace 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• flashdesk 5mo ago
  [dead]
• cush 5mo ago
  Do you know where you’re going yet?
• strangattractor 5mo ago
  I love the ideas and motivations underpinning Github's creation. For a long time Github was the best instantiation of those ideals. Maybe not so much anymore. Transitions are always the most difficult but they often result in new perspectives.
• pcarolan 5mo ago
  Thanks for all your open source work. You changed the industry for the better. Are you thinking of building a Github competitor? I would find that very appealing.
• kgilpin 5mo ago
  One of the biggest gifts in life is to find a true passion. And for every passion there are two sides to the coin - the joy and the suffering. The agony and the ecstasy. It’s a gift to care so much; and it inspires.
• xinayder 5mo ago
  It's not stupid to share your emotions towards a platform you've grown passionate of, especially when since Microsoft's acquisition, the platform has become enshittified, and now, vibe coded to an extent that there is not a single week where there are no issues with the platform.
• changyou 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• alpha_trion 5mo ago
  I'm interested to see where you land the project at post-GH. The platform has just not grown in the ways I had hoped and their reliability has been a real issue for awhile now. I would hope they would prioritize stability and features that devs have been asking for but it seems like that is not where their focus is at.
• sanity 5mo ago
  [dead]