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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

> Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating.

Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage? They are handling it a lot better than Github. Just because you have fast growth does not mean you can not handle it.

Instead you have to realize that you are entering into a high growth phase and design around that.

It has been clear that we are in a high growth phase for around a year now and Github still hasn't adapted to that properly.

At some point you have to admit that Github ready for the moment.

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GitHub is on Azure. Azure is notorious for being terrible. There was a post here recently from an ex-Azure engineer explaining all of this in a multi-part series.

Edit: Found the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242

I didn't think they'd completed the move yet, it's only partially on Azure - which to be fair could be another problem in itself.

Q. how can someone publish an article like that, with their name, etc...

Don't they sign NDAs? Do they not care? Are they not enforceable?

Very curious to know.

Maybe they didn’t take the severance part that makes the NDA valid? IIRC for an NDA to be enforceable there has to be a monetary consideration to it. Or maybe it’s for no competes?

NDAs often get signed when you join a company.

Some people reach a level of DGAF where it will not matter

Some fuck-ups have such long-lasting effects that they outlast the NDAs that would cover them

Isn't a lot of OpenAI infra also on Azure? They seem to be faring better than GitHub.

I bet OpenAI has failovers to other data centers. I think they have a variety of data center provides all over the place.

There's already a noun for this: "resources"

> Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage?

By spending tens of billions in investor cash. It is not clear what a sustainable business model looks like for these companies at the moment.

> They are handling it a lot better than Github.

Are they? Anthropic has fairly frequent issues.

There's high growth and then there's demand increasing 10x in a year. For a mature business like github that's a massive, and I can't think of many big businesses who would be able to scale smoothly to accommodate that kind of demand.

Yes, OAI is losing tens of billions, Anthro is losing billions, and MS is cashflow positive and rewarded for that by Wall St, according to recent earnings reports.

OpenAI and Claude don't accept commits and host PRs? How are they the same?

They're getting increasing demand for tokens at an accelerating pace.

Is that the same as storing state in a DB and on a filesystem though?

Like, I get there are other features they have, and things like history, but I don't think it's quite the same.

Isn't most (not all) of the LLM's resources stateless compute to a large degree?

(Not defending MS at all though, I currently can't create a PR on the required branch for my work (won't load the branch list) and their availability is really bad recently).

> Is that the same as storing state in a DB and on a filesystem though?

Google “RLHF”.

Didn’t knew they did that.

How else?

Fundamentally, there's incoming requests, an application server, and a database. The devil is in the nature of those requests, and how do you process those requests and stick them in the database. And then serve them back out again. Different application, different database, but fundamentally, it's the same problem. Google managed to do this very well. Microsoft has not.

They're undergoing the same kind of load. Almost every AI commit that's putting pressure on GitHub's servers was written on OpenAI and Anthropic's servers.

Scaling ChatGPT and scaling GitHub are very different problems.

For LLMs, prompt handling is effectively stateless. They do try to route follow-up prompts to the same cluster to benefit from prompt caching, but those can be effectively sharded. They also need to write results to storage but that's on a per-customer basis, so also easy to shard.

GitHub is a shared space, where commits and issues and PRs need to become instantly available to all readers across all geographies. They have a very different shape of scaling challenge to the LLM vendors.

> GitHub is a shared space, where commits and issues and PRs need to become instantly available to all readers across all geographies. They have a very different shape of scaling challenge to the LLM vendors.

Github data is accessible by all (if open source), but they should be partition-able by individual repository (and their related forks.). Thus while there is more shared state across users, it isn't fully shared state.

And they have been working on this semi-shared state design for over 10 years now.

Every response from GitHub must be deterministic. OpenAI and Anthropic do not have this problem.

OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Gemeni, etc also have another escape hatch: they can arbitrarily and potentially invisibly reduce your quality of service at their discretion. They can choose to route your request to an expensive model or a cheap one. By contrast, the best Github can do is slow your request down.

And they never even have to admit they do it.

I am pretty sure OpenAI and Claude actually have a higher hardware cost per request that Microsoft. Github is actually most just a standard REST API app, although with some caching and git specific operations in the background. It is not as hardware intensive as GPU-based inference per quest with huge contexts and low latency.

Also Github's feature offering has been incredibly stable for the last 6 years. There isn't an excuse for it to be unstable like this.

Yes, but come on...

That's due to the need for ultra-fast memory and inference compute, it's not the same thing.

> They are handling it a lot better than Github.

No, they are not.

https://status.claude.com/

https://www.githubstatus.com/

OpenAI and Anthropic are spending hundreds of billions of dollars that they may never recoup forcing the building massive new data centers in the face of widespread protest.

You think GitHub ought to match that?

> OpenAI and Anthropic are spending hundreds of billions of dollars that they may never recoup forcing the building massive new data centers in the face of widespread protest.

So has Github's owner Microsoft. It's build out is on par with OpenAI and Anthropic.

> You think GitHub ought to match that?

Microsoft is.

The issue is that the software stack is not stable. That is clearly the issue here.

It isn't a hardware build out issue. It is related to the architecture of Github.

Well they heavily limit free tier usage and for paid users they are charging a tiered pricing model that ramps up very aggressively. Github is a lot more generous in this sense and it has a lot more surface area in terms of the functionality it serves

Claude has 1 to 2 nines of uptime if you check their uptime history on their site. And I'll note that their definition of up is... generous. Plenty of times I encounter it saying no issues when there are abundant service issues.

GitHub is not able to charge in proportion to commits pushed, and can't scale in proportion either without it being too expensive.

For a very long time this year Claude was down multiple times a week. Can’t speak for OpenAI

Open AI and Claude were not nearly as mature as Github when the boom started. That's a lot of legacy infra to scale up.

anthropic frequently rate limits or is just unavailable... so I wouldn't exactly say they are handling it better.

This would require foresight, budget, and attention. MS currently has none of these.

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