Auf Wiedersehen, GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Auf Wiedersehen, GitHub

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179 pointsben_hall106 comments

It's interesting that he signs off with "So long, and thanks for all the fish," which is a quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Just before the Vogons demolish Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass, the dolphins, knowing what’s coming, leave the planet and their farewell message is “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

I wonder what he's implying about GitHub…

It's also a common goodbye message from "cool people" lol, I won't read too much into it.

> I wonder what he's implying about GitHub

Nothing. It's just a common(-ish) reference/joke.

Yeah, I didn't know it was a reference to something - it was just a saying to me without any background context.

Yes. I've also used this when leaving a job, albeit with a slight modification since the job did not provide fish. I suppose you could read it with the subtext that the dolphins are saying "see ya suckers" but I think it's more appropriate to read it as the dolphins actually saying "thank you" even though things didn't entirely work out.

"Thanks for all the phish."

    scp emails.db tom@dohmke.dev:/home/.

I had a coworker say this when quitting. Most people that knew the reference interpreted it in a negative way. I would not recommend using it because of how ambiguous it is

tbh I had never thought carefully about it until now. I always got excited hearing it from other people thinking "Oh another person who likes Douglas Adam's book!"

I'm kind of glad I read this thread though, I can see why it could stress people out.

One of my reports was a hardcore HHGG fan, including carrying a towel on towel day. He signed off with the "so long and thanks for all the fish", and I don't think anyone read anything negative into this.

In fact, while that was some years ago, it was a tight-knit team and we still meet up for dinner with the original team members about 2-3x a year :)

Yeah. I always interpreted that quote as the dolphins saying “thanks, it was fun while it lasted”

If I remember correctly, the dolphins had tried to warn humanity without success and eventually gave up and left, so the “see ya suckers” reading doesn’t quite track.

Maybe I'm reading "see ya suckers" wrong, but IMHO that reading absolutely tracks. "See ya suckers... [we tried to warn you]"

The reference likely hints at GitHub's transformation under Microsoft - the dolphins (Thomas and team) foresaw changes coming (AI integration and corporate direction) and are gracefully departing before the "demolition" of what GitHub originally stood for.

I rather think the AI integration was mainly driven by this dude, given his recent dumb AI related tweets before he was stepped down.

> I wonder what he's implying about GitHub…

Don't forget to carry a towel at all times, of course!

Or don't listen to Vogon poetry.

well, the rest of it, at least from the BBC TV series:

so long and thanks for all the fish, so sad that it should come to this, the world's about to be destroyed, there's no point getting all annoyed, lie back and let the planet dissolve

He is probably just trying to sound cool after years of being an "AI" apparatchik. GitHub stole our code under the pretense of "democratizing" software development (while people in poor countries cannot afford the plagiarism machine).

Don't read too much into it. It's a common sign-off in GitHub's internal culture for when people leave.

Vogsphere is the home planet of the Vogons, and features an especially fascinating type of flora that can read one’s thoughts, and anytime it detects an original thought, it jumps out of the ground and swiftly smacks said thinker square in the face. It’s a world that punishes novelty and intelligence.

My home wifi network has been named Vogsphere for some time now…

It would make a great name for an AI startup.

> GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon.

Just in case you thought that Microsoft considered GitHub to be a development tool.

>guiding us into the age of Copilot and AI, it has been the ride of a lifetime.

Cool. Can we get faster load times on that mess of a SPA now instead of more AI stuff?

isnt it a rails mpa with some modern layers on top?

why bother to know that when you can just deride one of HN's favorite things to hate?

They've been rewriting more and more of the site in React as time's gone on, and all new development has been in React. This means we get fun stuff like diffs being slow to load and failing to load at all when they're too large, the browser back button being unreliable, the code viewer being laggy for viewing large files, etc. Generally they don't seem to care about the site becoming as slow and janky as Gitlab.

Given that it’s going to be a part of “Microsoft CoreAI organization”, whatever that is, there will be even more AI stuff.

I don't mind more AI stuff even if I don't use it. The fact that they've been neglecting the core user experience is more of my complaint

I mean it’s Microsoft. The UI experience will decline until it reaches Teams level.

A good opportunity for a new git hosting service to emerge to fill the void.

This is the right time for the Europeans to wake up!

Imagine if the European Union adds a mandate to say something along the lines of a web app can't use x amount of resources as it's just too much and encourages spending more on RAM unnecessarily instead of learning to make more efficient software.

> GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization

So the whole of GitHub is now seen primarily as an AI platform?

That's how The Verge is reporting it:

# GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation

## GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke has resigned, and now GitHub will be part of Microsoft’s AI engineering team.

https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas...

Infernally known as the "move fast break things" org

I mean, to be fair, it seems to be the prevailing culture in GitHub for a while now, to quote Nat Friedman[1]; "It's important to do things fast . . . Going fast makes you focus on what's important; there's no time for bullshit".

[1] https://nat.org/

Well, Nat Friedman is an expert++ level bullshitter, so he should know all about bullshit. /s

I always knew Vista was a window into hell

That’s worrying given how far behind its perceived the CoreAI products are relative to competitors.

Everything at Microsoft is seen primarily as an AI platform, but especially developer focused stuff is all AI. They've rolled up all the Azure stuff on our account team to be represented by our "Cloud and AI" specialist, even though we aren't using AI in any of our PaaS/IaaS Azure usage

Microsoft is one of big ones to tank big if AI boom fizzles out.

Eh, I don't think so. They've realigned basically everything to have some kind of AI component, or the dev story to be AI heavy but if AI evaporates tomorrow Azure is still there, Microsoft 365 is still there. It would be a hit to their growth story but they wouldn't be out of business

This is correct. “AI” has simply been stapled onto a bunch of established properties, and injected into a bunch of places without permission. I have several clients who are small healthcare providers, and I have had to beat Copilot off with my HIPAA-shaped stick, but it’s not been easy, as it just shows up in some other place (or even gets reinstalled entirely), so now update Tuesday has become “scan-endpoints-for-copilot-again-Tuesday” (Taco Tuesday and Two For Tuesday on 99.7 FM remain unaffected).

I think it’s really telling that AI could disappear tomorrow, and aside from a gigantic hole where half a trillion bucks used to be, not much would really change.

Don’t tell me you’re surprised.

Am I the only one who find it a bit uncouth/weird to do this last week https://ashtom.github.io/developers-reinvented

and peace out this week?

He made his money, he doesn't care who starves now

He already made his money when they sold HockeyApp to MSFT

I bet this was the reason why he suddenly "resigned".

(Cross-posting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44867429 .)

I've seen enough: as the recognised authority and designated responsible person ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525256 I'm officially recognising this as the final end of 2010s Cool Microsoft.

> 74 points by leoc on April 3, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler

> Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad old ways).

Historical debate may now begin.

Good riddance. I'd never even heard of this man until he came out telling developers to "get out of your career" [0] after stealing all their open source code for Copilot. Instant animosity.

GitHub is completely unrecognizable compared to how it was before being gamified and turned into social media.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808645

> gamified and turned into social media.

What makes you think this? I use it for work and it's never been better in terms of features, and is just as reliable as usual.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about with gamification and social media. The only gamification I can think of is the commit graph which has been a thing for at least a decade.

> I honestly have no idea what you're talking about with gamification and social media. The only gamification I can think of is the commit graph which has been a thing for at least a decade.

There was a time before "achievements" or badges and NARCISSISM.MD files on your profile page.

The UI has clearly regressed in terms of performance and responsiveness over the years, when GitHub insisted on making the code viewer a pseudo-IDE. There was even an article making this observation here on HN just last week [0].

Do you seriously feel that GitHub of 2025 has had less outages and more stability than GitHub of 2015?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861

I'm sure if you count incidents vs 2015, 2025 has more. But it also has more scale in every aspect. More features, more users, etc. Over the years of using GitHub I've only been blocked from doing dev activities a handful of times because of GitHub outages. None of them are very memorable.

I appreciate the enhancements to the code viewer, like jumping between symbols.

It has too many features, the configuration menu is overcomplicated. I had to ask Claude how to create a token and what permissions to assign it in order to be able to clone a repo. Of course we need AI with this amount of nonsense.

> There was a time before "achievements" or badges and NARCISSISM.MD files on your profile page.

That's what annoys you? The profile pages of other people?

Gitea's interface feels nice to used compared to the UI of GitHub and Gitlab of today. It's mostly server-side rendered.

> just as reliable as usual

The widespread downtime issues the last years aren't what I call usual

Steal? They gave it up willingly through naivete. But you would NEVER get a developer to admit such a thing

Not all open sources licenses are MIT or as permissive as MIT

How many times has OSS licensing been enforced? Therein lies the naivete

> GitHub is completely unrecognizable compared to how it was before being gamified and turned into social media.

Huh? The whole premise on which Github was founded was that it was "social coding". The phrase was even in the logo in the early days [0]. Social features like stars, following, and the activity feed have been there from very early on.

If anything, I feel like Github has become a lot more corporate and enterprisey since getting bought by Microsoft.

[0] https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/3e6c0720-b15a...

GitHub was founded to make managing permissions and sharing a git repo easier. It was a nightmare when git was first starting to get traction. Their original tagline was “git repo hosting - no longer a pain in the ass.”

The social stuff came later as they realized that a big part of the friction in software development (and the actual business opportunity) was the actual working together part. They really innovated here and created a culture of workflows that has permeated the way most of us work.

But then there were a few years where they really didn’t seem to do anything of note (I remember there was a five month stretch where they didn’t post a single product update). And then they got bought. After that I don’t really know what their intention has been, but I guess this change brings it more into focus.

The product works fine for our use cases (and the fact everyone has a GitHub account makes the management piece super easy even with wacky enterprise requirements), but I hope they don’t start jacking up prices to pay for AI that I really really don’t want.

Your link references a Business Insider editorial—possibly written by ai—that intentionally misquotes him.

The title of that article is "GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out."

and in that article, the quote is:

> "Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career," Dohmke wrote, citing one of the developers who GitHub interviewed.

but the text in the blog post that BI cited was:

> The developers who found success with AI tools have a strong underlying motivation to prepare for what they anticipate will be an overhaul of their profession. To that end, they relentlessly experiment with various AI tools, even when the tools aren’t consistently helpful. “Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career” one developer said.

Which honestly seems like poor phrasing on the supposed developer's part, but it wasn't the CEO saying it. Entropy all the way down.

Edit: Nevermind, apparently he did say that in various social media posts. It seems like an intentionally outrageous move that's been pretty typical of CEOs lately, but he did say it. Incidentally, I'm happy I'm so out of touch with other social media that I didn't know lol

He did use it as the opening line in his tweet, making it look like a statement he was making. No quotation marks around it or anything.

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6660a5bfdcf6c5fbf039f446/...

Ya fair enough, LinkedIn too. I'm happy that I don't check any of those platforms enough to have even considered checking, but he did say it apparently.

This is just laundering editorial through some anonymous phantom; if he didn't offer any qualification or pushback, he's effectively endorsing the opinions being expressed. At the end of the article he also talks about devs being mere humans being reluctant to change and how "that's okay". This is very typical C-suite therapy speak. There's no need to unpack _why_ the skepticism exists, it just needs to be worked around until the inevitable truth™ is accepted.

It's common, but I always find it weird when the manager of a division of a company is called the "CEO".

Satya Nadella is the CEO of Github because Github is part of Microsoft.

It really depends on how the structure of the company is setup. If they're just a division, they're not really a CEO; but if all Microsoft did is buy up all the shares of Github, and otherwise left them alone, they really ARE the CEO.

Until the shareholder decides to tell the board to fire him.

Major subsidiaries within a large company can and do have separate CEOs. For example, YouTube also has a separate CEO (previously Susan Wojcicki, and now Neal Mohan) under Sundar Pichai.

It’s also common within Microsoft. I can’t speak to when/why they decide to do it, but the leads for the Microsoft Gaming (Phill Spencer) and LinkedIn [acquired 2016] (Ryan Roslansky) are both CEOs in the org chart at Microsoft.

What is a CEO if not a high level manager?

All CEOs are managers, but not all managers are CEOs. A CEO is the highest ranking executive.

"Managing agents to achieve outcomes may sound unfulfilling to many, although we argue that’s what developers have been doing on a lower level of abstraction, managing their computers via programming languages to achieve outcomes." [From another one of his blogs]

That actually pissed me off. Here I thought I was creative work all these years and here comes this corporate drone telling us we were "managing outcomes".

Related ongoing thread:

GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44865560 - Aug 2025 (18 comments)

According to Axios, the GitHub CEO position will not be filled.

> GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced Monday that he plans to step down, with Microsoft opting not to directly replace the position, according to memos shared first with Axios.

https://www.axios.com/2025/08/11/github-ceo-dohmke-step-down

AI is so powerful nowadays that they figured they could replace the CEO position with AI.

In this case, I even suspect it’s possible.

For the people who are leaving GitHub due to concerns over Copilot stealing their code, where are you going? GitLab? Self hosting your own?

I always have a private Gitea instance running for my private projects. VPS are cheap in 2025 and it doesn't eat much resources.

Also heard good things about Forgejo.

That's what gitea is called nowadays. The name changes every few years

They're different projects.

https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/

On the same codebase

I run Gitea too - Seeing what is happening over at GitHub solidifies my decision.

Not too concerned over my public facing repos, Amazon and OpenAI seem to love 'em! I have the ultimate control over my private repos (nothing juicy). I can't say I trust Microsoft not to do something I don't like at any point in the future.

Edit: I should say I wish phabricator got more love, that was a great tool!

My private repos would contaminate the Copilot LLM for life. Haha.

Have fun Microsoft getting that foul apple out of your system again.

Documentation for it looks pretty straightforward; are you doing anything special for security besides a reverse proxy?

If you can put everything behind a Wireguard or other VPN tunnel.

I personally am self-hosting. Going anywhere else that is central again would just shift the shit-pile somewhere else. At least with self-hosting I know that my code is not used for AI training.

Codeberg is nice but it's for open-source projects only. I think Codefloe.com is a nice alternative.

Sourcehut is great. Way better DX and performance.

[flagged]

He got replaced by AI?

Maybe he did not embrace AI enthusiastically enough...

https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...

one can hope

In a way, yes!

> GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon.

Github still is not accessible over IPv6.

WTH.

I regularly see that complaint over on r/ipv6. Maybe the new guy will ask for it???

I wonder how much crime the ms has committed by training their AI on someone else’s code. I wonder if they dipped their fingers in private repositories, too.

I am thinking of migrating all my code from there to self hosted. If now github is part of the Ai team at microsoft then I really don't want to give them more of my code as Im kind of moving on from open source to making projects closed, I dont see a reason to have a closed source project there

Did he resign because he wants to do something different, and Microsoft decided not to replace him and bring GitHub deeper into Microsoft? Or did Microsoft decide to bring it deeper into the company, removing his position in the process? Maybe a bit of the former, but definitely mostly the latter.

what's his next thing, is that known?

Now there is no CEO of GitHub to contact the next time it goes down.

GitHub is done.

Without checking the article… do you know the name of who write the article?

Yes, I also thought Satya Nadella was stepping down from his role as CEO of Github.

But he never had that role. Satya is the CEO of Microsoft

Hell, I don't know the name even after I checked the article. I've never heard of him before.

I read the title too quickly, assumed it was some German guy named Auf, then realized I was an idiot a few minutes later.

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