Calling the people who work on GitHub “losers” is not cool.
Microsoft is doing more with Github than I can say for most of their products. I won't go to bat for the Xbox or Windows teams, but Github is... fine. Almost offensively usable.
But even then, you are right that that the moat of social cachet and implicit trust is still more valuable than the moat of technical implementation.
Now - what if you are not ok with it? What can you do?
> Almost offensively usable
I think you conflate two points here. One is how useable github is. The other is: control. At which point are you no longer ok with what a private company does? This is not solely about Microsoft alone by the way.
Yes. Are you not? It's one of the most effective measures to prevent a whole class of supply chain attacks. On Github the 2FA is also flexible enough to allow non-hardware passkeys, so you can choose a privacy preserving option with good UX.
For example it was impossible to remove/delete a phone number 2fa, even if you registered multiple other 2fa sources like security keys.
> intermittent outages
Those seem like conflicting statements to me. Last outage was only 13 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915731.
Also, there have been increasing reports of open source maintainers dealing with LLM generated PRs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274. GitHub seems perfectly positioned to help manage that issue, but in all likelihood will do nothing about it: '"Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career," Dohmke wrote, citing one of the developers who GitHub interviewed.'
I used to help maintain a popular open source library and I do not envy what open source maintainers are now up against.
I genuinely don't understand this position. Is this not what Github issues bots were made for? No matter where your repo is hosted, you take the onus of moderating it onto yourself.
Downtimes are an issue, it's why I jokingly mentioned it. Besides that I'm without gripe. Make Github a high-nines service and I'll keep using it until the wheels fall off.
The outages have gone from "almost every Friday" to "several times per week".
I don’t use Azure or Windows. At work I push against Teams and actively try to persuade customers not to use Microsoft products. The reason isn’t even ideological - most of the time their products suck and the dev support is bad. VScode may be an exception, I’ll give them that.
Then your beef is with capitalism, not Github/MSFT.
EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. It's not a value judgement on Github employees, it's about the meaning of the word "loser". Go back to your teenage years. What's a loser? Someone, often through no fault of their own, keep being in a bad situation, having the "short end of the stick". What characteristically makes them losers is that they lack the audacity to snap out of it.
Isn't that an accurate definition of what "loser" generally means?
"Loser" is a catch-all taunt that bypasses empathy. But certainly they might be 'in a losing situation', which is an important distinction.
> Except for the "disabilities" part, which is problematic to classify
Disability in this context is something intrinsic to the person (e.g., physically, mentally) that makes the employment process substantially difficult to engage with.
In addition to disability, difficulty can also arise do to any prejudice that might be levelled against them (e.g., ageism, sexism, junior vs senior, skin color, language skills, country of origin), as well as visa consideration, financial situation, etc. There's so many things that affect the risk calculus of changing jobs.
Admittedly some of those may be a bit ... unusual. Like the guy who created TempleOS.
So unless you've got any bright ideas, I'm stuck in this Microsoft job till someone comes up with some magical Linux roles, or I start my own Linux-based company and twiddle my thumbs because there's no customers...
Why bring people down so hard? That is really solid money and you can provide for a family, retire in your 40s, and it is work that does not destroy your body.
Trying to ascribe positive/negative impact to strangers isn't usually a useful exercise, even if you have enough data to make a solid case. It can be cathartic -- imagine a different world where programmers making things worse would screw off and go do something else that's not programing! (I have a similar imagining, like of a world where programming is done by those who love it even outside of work -- even though I've worked with and helped hire excellent engineers who only treated programming as a job, they weren't my favorite to work with, and some were very much not excellent.) The best you can hope for is to trigger some self-reflection, and I do think that's important on an individual level. It's better to not make the world uglier, if you notice yourself doing so, and it's not just a distortion of your thinking, then you should probably stop, do something else, or figure out if it's at a level that you can compensate. A Richard Stallman quote I like:
"The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."
It's so refreshing to read such a truly philosophical insight.
Interestingly that is synonymous with losers according the definition of it in gervais principle. Which weirdly makes being called a loser less of an insult. (More like realist)
"I also strongly believe that you should not be proud of working for Microsoft, and particularly on GitHub for the last 5 years. I truly am sorry but you need to be called out."
https://hachyderm.io/@andrewrk@mastodon.social/1156234452984...
What people don't like about LLM PRs is typically:
a. The person proposing the PR usually lacks adequate context and so it makes communication and feedback, which are essential, difficult if not impossible. They cannot even explain the reasoning behind the changes they are proposing, b. The volume/scale is often unreasonable for human reviewed to contend with. c. The PR may not be in response to an issue but just the realization of some "idea" the author or LLM had, making it even harder to contextualize. d. The cost asymmetry, generally speaking is highly unfavorable to the maintainers.
At the moment, it's just that LLM driven PRs have these qualities so frequently that people use LLM bans as a shorthand since writing out a lengthy policy redescrbiing the basic tenets of participation in software development is tedious and shouldn't be necessary, but here we are, in 2025 when everyone has seemingly decided to abandon those principles in favor of lazyily generating endless reams of pointless code just because they can.
LLMs reduce the effort to create a plausible PR down to virtually zero. Requiring a human to write the code is a good indicator that A. the PR has at least some technical merit and B. the human cares enough about the code to bother writing a PR in the first place.
The vast majority of of LLM generated code that gets submitted in PRs on public GitHub projects is not that - see the examples they gave.
Reviewing all of that code on its merits alone in order to dismiss it would take an inordinate amount of time and effort that would be much better spent improving the project. The alternative is a blanket LLM generated code ban, which is a lot less effort to enforce because it doesn't involve needing to read piles and piles of nonsense.
Usually I hate quoting "laws" but think about it. I do agree that it would be awesome if we scrutinize 10+k lines of code to bring big changes but its not really feasible is it?
No, its pretty standard legal policy actually.
But it's fine to say "this PR makes no sense to me explain it better please" and close it.
No, I don't think it is. There's more nuance to this debate than either "we're banning all LLM code" or "all of our features are vibe coded".
A blanket ban on unreviewed LLM code is a perfectly reasonable way to mitigate mass-produced slop PRs, but it is not reasonable to ban all code generated by an LLM. Not only is it unenforceable, but it's also counterproductive for people who genuinely get value out of it. As long as the author reviews the code carefully before opening a PR and can be held responsible, there's no problem.
When there's a grey zone then there will be lots of pointless discussions like "why was this AI-generated PR accepted but not mine" etc etc...
However, I don't think that banning all AI-generated code is reasonable. Having an LLM generate a couple of functions or a bit of boilerplate in an otherwise manually coded PR should not invalidate it from being accepted if it's helpful.
LLMs jump at the first opportunity to use regex for EVERYTHING instead of doing proper lexing/parsing, for example. You need to repeatedly tell it not to use regex. In the end you might as well hand write your code, because you actually know how it works, unlike a clueless LLM.
More seriously: I probably wouldn't have called every single current employee of GitHub a "loser", but more because I think truly cool people don't define themselves by where they happen to work at any given time. I'm sure the vast majority of people at GitHub are just tech employees trying to earn a living and don't particularly care whether the Zig guy thinks they're cool or not. What actually matters is that GitHub is a big centralized platform run by Microsoft for their own ends, and it's good to be free of it.
It reminds me of the creeps in school that punched me, shoved me into lockers, tried to assault me.
I almost killed myself as a kid because of bullies. Some people never grow out of that, it seems.
Regardless, it's hard for me to imagine that many readers will find great intellectual interest in a long thread about what a terrible person Andrew is.
Calling people losers isn't classy, but if I were a well-paid Microsoft employee I'd laugh all the way to the bank that some community funded purist called me that. If it's supposed to be bullying he isn't very good at it.
They're punching employees on a team. People with less freedom and autonomy than the Ziglang ICs.
On the scale of FAANG comp, Microsoft is at the lower end of the scale. I've had several jobs making more in TC than Microsofties.