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Comment by indianhippie | Hacker News Reader

This is reaching an unacceptable level of performance. There isn't a week that work isn't interrupted by GH.

AI agents have changed the scalability properties of basically the entire internet.

It used to be that GitHub could rely on a finite number of people interacting with their platform in real human ways in real observable patterns. So I'm assuming that they scale for those patterns, and optimize for the UI and UX hotspots.

But now everyone's got a moltbot running 24/7, sometimes many, and it's completely overloading a lot of services. Especially services like GitHub which are very much agent-centric nowadays.

>AI agents have changed the scalability properties of basically the entire internet.

Why is GH the only service provider seeing such consistently bad availability then? Everyone has had to scale massively all the time, if GH is choosing moltbots capacity over basic availability for the rest of the humans, they have made the wrong choice.

Some people really abuse the f out of the system in a way optimized to take github down. Like they push every minute or for every commit instead of with certain time intervals (e.g. a single push a few times a day for each repo).

I follow some of the accounts that run 24/7 agent sesssion. Their projects are not even that novel for the number of commits that appear on the profile. Many of the commits have the log of beads, claude session etc (no change to the actual code). Some of them are ports of some projects to another language. AI surely will increase the productivity, but the waste and noise that some people are willing to commit ....

It's not new, it's just a DoS, which is a serious crime, just report the attacker to the police if in your country, or block their IP if not. If done accidentally, it's likely not a crime but the police will still scare them to stop doing it.

Microsoft buys github.

Microsoft forces AI usage down everyone's throats.

AI bot usage takes down github.

I have to assume that there are some serious fights going on between the poor SRE teams wanting to throttle bots, and MS not wanting to do anything to dissuade AI usage.

How do you throttle bots? Everyone will stop having commit msgs mentioning LLM agents. then what?

GH was going down before AI explosion. The start of the trend is MS buying it, not AI explosion, that is just final nail

It's been unacceptable for months, but now it's at the level of "we should actively look for alternatives".

Any centralized solution like GitHub is going to suffer the same fate as vibe coding chokes these services. The only option to have high uptime is to self host and most organizations can't do that easily. Time will tell if GitHub can scale up enough to meet demand.

It's a nice thought but I think the revealed preference from the history of the internet is that people actually only want centralised services, no matter what they say they want.

People love to clown on the fediverse because of having to choose a server. Which is no different from email. I guess the difference is that their ISP used to give them email.

Not really. It is possible to implement systems that handle a lot more scale than github has. This is proven by systems that exist today.

It might be hard to create such systems using ruby and microslop AI management though

Things are a lot better in Europe. I stopped working hours before this incident started, and I can't really remember any major work-stopping indicents in the past months. I only remember once trying to do hobby stuff in the evening that was impacted recently.

A week? You're going to be happy with more than a day without an incident.

I lost track which Monday morning PST in a row this is.

I would say we are way past unacceptable.

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