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Comment by insanitybit | Hacker News Reader

It's (a) they're under massively increased load because everyone's vibing up new projects these days, (b) they've been in a weird frankenstein "on azure but also we have our own control plane" state for years and they're pushing to no longer have that be the case.

I don't think vibecoding at Github has much to do with it.

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I started using an agent (Codex) on my repo and it went from a a few dozen clones to thousands (3383 this week). I dunno what the agents are doing to clone the repo so many times -- I'm not running 3000 agents or prompts, maybe 10 or so this week. But if this is typical, a 1000x increase in usage across the board can't be good on the system.

> I dunno what the agents are doing to clone the repo so many times

agentic "ai" is going great

Ah, yes. A lot more repos, commits, and most importantly huge PRs.

That makes sense. Thank you!

No, it doesn’t. Their competition is not similarly unstable, despite existing in the same world of LLMs. Think critically.

Devil’s advocate, Pareto heuristic would let us speculate that 80% of LLM traffic would be aimed directly at the largest provider, i.e. GitHub.

I think it’s much more than 80%, it’s probably the default recommendation and folks who aren’t technical would just accept it. Probably closer to 95% or more

Your speculation is that their competitors would naturally not see a commensurate increase in instability while “only” handling 20% of the same crisis?

I don’t buy the excuse. I want to hitch my wagon to those “mysteriously lucky” competitors. (And have. And haven’t had similar issues to Github, since.)

Competitors would be long tail, so a different mode of traffic entirely. Maybe they get spikes that are more easily whack-a-moled than the constant hammering that GitHub receives.

Tough to say as this is all speculative, though.

It's probably a threshold thing isn't it? You wouldn't get 20% of the effect at 20% of the traffic. There's a step function in there somewhere.

Isn't the relative increase more of interest? If someone was only owning 10% of the market, and they've only gotten 8% (percentage points) of the 20%-not-GH LLM-related increase, they'd still be seeing a very similar spike compared to their baseline as GitHub.

Their competition doesn't have nearly the same scale of traffic because they don't have nearly the same scale of users or network effects.

Think critically.

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