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Comment by mgdev | Hacker News Reader

This is, as they say, "The beginning of the end."

Beginning of the end of what? If I could have take a bet, “Will GitHub move to Azure?” a few years ago, I would have thrown money down.

This seems inevitable since the acquisition and not necessarily a bad thing. I see it as neutral.

The point is that they are prioritizing this over new features.

But since “new features” consists primarily of shoving the bloody copilot agent down everyones throat, it might not be such a bad thing.

That plus the new React diff viewer in beta. The old one seemed to be a simpler Web Component inside a Rails turbo frame.

I've tested the beta one and like most SPAs it doesn't scale well to large amounts of data (large numbers of files / line counts). You can feel the DOM slowing down even on a high end macbook. It even blanked out the page a couple times, another common issue when browsers are overloaded. So I switched back to the old one.

The new one also doesn’t consistently snap to a specific line in the URL fragment if the diff is too large, which makes sharing links problematic.

>The point is that they are prioritizing this over new features.

Good! Shoring up infrastructure vs. delivering the latest hotness is something that is rarely prioritized. I'll take boring and reliable every day of the week.

Fair point, but I believe they are just migrating for the sake of pleasing their MS overlords.

Does anyone know what infra they are running on now? AWS?

You would be a fool to think the Copilot Coding Agent is not their most important feature at the moment. It's not particularly great, but it must become so.

The infrastructure behind serving git repos the way they do is pretty fiddly—I'd not be a bit surprised if this move reduces stability and/or performance.

Sure but it also might make them fix some of that.

No, I mean inherently so. It's basically a whole stack of caching problems.

That started with MS and accelerated with Copilot. Word is that GH leadership doesn't care about anything other than Copilot/AI. All other features are receiving far less focus and fewer resources. I've heard this repeatedly from current and former employees.

nah, I'd say we're well past that. The beginning might have been Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub. Or the elimination of GitHub's independence.

IMHO: the acceleration curve into point-of-no-return was when Microsoft decided to go hard on AI, and saw GitHub's Copilot as one of the key inflection points they were going to use to do so - even going so far to adopt the Copilot brand across the entire company.

Before that, it still felt like there _some_ degree of autonomy and ability to think about the developer experience on the platform as a whole. Once ChatGPT took off and MSFT decided that they were going to go hard on AI, though, Copilot (and therefore GitHub) became too important to Microsoft to leave alone.

I kinda suspect the slide was inevitable anyway, given how acquisitions tend to go. But IMO, Copilot was the tsunami that washed the octocat out to sea.

It does remind the oldsters of Hotmail.com

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