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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

- There are already viable GitHub replacements, like Codeberg, Bitbucket, Gitlab, etc. Everyone stays on Github for network effects, not because of the superior product. You can't vibe code network effects.

- And yes, GitHub is a massive product with like 50 different huge features. No reasonable person would say you can trivially vibecode that. Vibecoding would still make it easier. I feel this argument is a bit silly, no? "Ah, you can't vibecode GitHub in a weekend? That proves vibecoding was a mirage!" Surely even the most fervent anti-AI skeptic must admit there must be some middle ground between "a mirage" and "can literally replace millions of man-hours of work".

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Why do network effects matter for "in-house" (i.e. corporate/commercial) software work?

Open-source projects, yes I can sort of get it, you want to be where the contributors are (but there are downsides to that also).

A ton of third-party tools only work with the most popular providers, github, and then gitlab, then nothing, then the rest.

OK, but if using these tools means tolerating ~80% uptime then maybe reconsider.

First they came for the four nines And I did not speak out Because I was not a power grid

Then they came for the three nines And I did not speak out Because I was not paying for Enterprise

Then they came for the two nines And I did not speak out Because the status page said all systems operational

Then they came for the one nine And I did not speak out Because I was a manager, and outages are just extra standup material

Then they came for the coin flip And there was no one left to merge my PR Because Actions was down And so was Pages And so was Codespaces And the status page said all systems operational

OK, say you're proposing an in-house tool to host your repo to your boss. What do you think will sound better? "Let's use this random vibecoded app I just found"? Or "Let's use GitHub"?

What network effects does GitHub have? Every repository is independent. It's like saying GoDaddy has network effects.

Everyone already has an account, so there's no friction to opening up issues, adding thumbs up to issues, using the discussion forum, etc. And while I think it's pretty silly, a lot of people take "10k stars on GitHub" to be a positive signal, and you can only get there when you have 10k people willing to star on your platform.

"sign in with github" could easily achieve that

Turns out, the brand itself is a moat. There's never going to be another Google or Uber or Facebook or Twitter. Good or bad, GitHub is always going to have the name GitHub.

Forge-jo is super interesting too!

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