Hacker News Reader

Comment by bilalq | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this misses the value of something like Github or Origin entirely though. There's nothing terribly difficult about hosting a git server. The UX and pull requests capabilities are a little involved, but there are alternatives today.

What makes Github special is the ecosystem and integrations. Sentry, Linear, and so many other tools have special UX around Github. You need centralization (or at the very least, a standard) for that.

It sucks to see Github's fall from grace, but I just can't bring myself to use a service like this under the custody of SpaceX. I've been saying this for a while, but I really wish Linear would swoop in and become the unified platform for software development.

View on HN

It sucks to see Github's fall from grace, but I just can't bring myself to use a service like this under the custody of SpaceX.

Agreed. It's like going from bad to worse. Not to mention, Origin doesn't even support actions. They are doing the easiest part of git hosting and no mention of anything that actually makes Github what it is. What Origin is offering is literally a weekend project, and anything having to do with Elon is arguably one of the least trustworthy organizations in whatever industry he chooses to participate in. No, thank you.

This is going nowhere. GitLab is the cautionary tale. Massive funding, nine figures of ARR, years of losses, and most of the revenue comes from self-managed enterprise licenses rather than the SaaS. If the best-funded attempt lands there, I don't see how this one goes anywhere when they have not even a minimum viable product and reputational issues right out of the gate.

Actions should be decoupled from the version control system.

I disagree. The integrated workflow of actions, issues, code review and source control is a huge productivity win. There’s a reason people chase a “single pane of glass”.

A website where one views and interacts with all of these things does not necessitate that all of these things run on the same system. Since this most recent GitHub outage, I'm looking into modularizing my git server, issues, and actions; there's no reason why one going down should bring down all the others.

In theory, sure, but the reality is that "development activity" revolves around "codebase". Plenty of projects have separate bug tracker, source code control and CI system. Most people likely prefer GitHub's all-in-one solution, especially for small-medium open source projects.

And do we not see how terrible this is as a result? Hitching your tent to corporations, especially American corporations, is always an exercise in misery.

*Atlassian from Australia has joined the chat*

Mostly they joined the chat to show you what real misery is. I tried Jira and they couldn't even handle simple billing without screwing it up. Ugh

I recently had to rebuild a jira frontend from scratch just so a single jira tab didn't take down my 8gb MacBook. Support only the subset of features I actually use and it's great. Makes me hate jira even more.

Thankfully, there is a Jira CLI tool[1].

[1] https://github.com/ankitpokhrel/jira-cli/

and thankfully there is linear. :-)

I'm not saying it's an objectively "good" solution, just how damn smooth the experience is.

They've already separated the wiki's version control, why not CI? And the issues/discussions are just vendor lock-in wrapped in a shiny UI.

The thing with Gitlab is probably that it had to deal with the network effect/winner takes all conundrum. GitHub was first on the scene, it was the first to make a centralised hub popular and it has had the custom of many notable open source projects.

Gitlab as a product is miles ahead of GitHub at this point. (Except at the point of scaling very large repositories I gather.) There is just very little money in saas beside the bespoke enterprise contracts.

I’m not sure how revenue between GitHub and Gitlab compared before the Microsoft acquisition and now but GitHub has always leaned on being the popular tool with the network.

What do you mean by "Github's fall from grace"? What happened?

https://www.githubstatus.com/history

Is this a result of too much activity on GitHub (AI-driven jump in repos), though, rather than a fall?

Mostly it seems like greatly increased usage pushing their systems to the limit.

SO a company Github's size can't handle the slop they invested a lot to enable and this is not a failure? I mean if the market moves and you cannot move with it, what do we call it?

Ahhh okay. They've definitely had some growing pains. By "fall from grace", I assumed you meant some sort of ethical/trust failure.

That too, ever since they decided everything on GitHub was fair game for training AI without respecting its license.

Of course, cursor is going to be even worse than github in that realm.

Github has lost trust. This wasn’t an isolated incident.

What does make GitHub what it is? Weekly downtime that cripples our companies?

> a standard

Like a specification[^0], which is exactly what ActivityPub is and what federation in Forgejo is built around?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

I'm sure that sentry and co could spend a few bucks and commit a KPI in one of their upcoming quarters to figure out the activity pub spec and support integrating with it if their hearts desired. It's a chicken egg problem and we all know chickens exist. It's clear that the centralized model is getting left behind, especially as the EU is moving away from US services and they continue to invest in open source, European-based alternatives like Codeberg and Forgejo.

The communication protocol is not what I mean here. The feature-sets and capabilities around "pull requests", "reviews", "comments", "checks", "issues", "projects", "deployments", "releases", etc are all different across platforms. You have to integrate bespoke for each platform. There is no universal standard for how CI/CD, deployment tracking, project management, etc are done.

Yes, Sentry or whoever else could build a Codeberg integration, or a Forgejo one, or a Gitlab one. But these would all be bespoke. There is no standard. So the one with the biggest market share ends up with the most integrations. This is where we are today.

I'm all for open standards. But I don't even know of a proposal for such a standard.

Sure, with AI tooling, you can vibe code your own browser extensions or other integrations in some cases. But for a lot of platforms, that just won't cut it. That's before we even get into the maintenance burden of that.

Unlike GitHub's universal standard? Forgejo already has a near 1:1 github action format for forgejo actions. You can even use github actions in forgejo. You cant have AI build it out for a few tokens? Why are you so certain of failure?

Interfaces exist in programming languages. The strategy pattern is one of the gang of four patterns. I'm sure a good engineer or an AI can figure it all out or is that too hopeful? Unless Sentry engineers or AI are too incompetent to make adapters? I hope not, the market is in big trouble if a dev tooling org cant make tools for where devs are

That used to be a big deal. I don't think it is anymore.

One great thing about the rise of AI is that now it's super easy to make and maintain integrations. This is a place where AI coding uniquely shines due to the points being well defined and mostly quite standard.

This is going to hurt the monopoly power of software companies. But it'll be great for allowing the proliferation of smaller companies, open source, and home grown solutions.

I'm already seeing the pendulum swinging back to local first instead of cloud services.

Creating? Sure. Maintaining? absolutely not.

As someone who has some SaaS products that must connect to other SaaS products, I can tell you that this is somewhere that AI saved me a truck load of time.

A lot of SaaS companies change their API in subtle ways throughout the months probably too rapidly. GraphQL schema changes, splitting apart one api endpoint into 2, changes to authentication method required. A thousand little cuts.

This used to be my biggest time waster. Now it's barely on my radar. Life changing for me. I guess your mileage may vary.

Concurrently, the writing is on the wall for us SaaS product providers - lower margins, and more competition for the same reasons. I welcome it. More quality and choice at a better price for everyone.

At the same time, I think some kind of aggregator will emerge. In music, the tools to create music are so inexpensive that the market is flooded. In games it is becoming the same, now accelerated by LLMs. But there is always some type of aggregator ending up earning the money from most of that, rather than the people creating the content. Not sure how it will work out here, but I predict it will be another type of aggregator.

Yes but I don't think maintaining clones of SaaS products will be very easy. Maintaining integrations definitely gets a lot easier

You can get surprisingly far just by using git as a protocol. Such mundane things as tickets and chat logs do not really need any proprietary tech. Think Google OKF. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-th...

Agreed on all points.

I think people often forget that GitHub is really more akin to a social network than it is a software development tool.

By that I mean the stuff that makes GitHub great is all the same stuff that originally made social networks exciting (back before the algorithm was tuned into a horrifying cycle of negativity).

except when you are paying for their enterprise edition - and they make no distinction between paying customers (quite a bit actually once you add in actions costs + their other addons, it's quite a bit of money) and their free tier full of AI slop PRs on rando projects.

As someone who pays github, I'm super annoyed at the downtime and still I'm getting charged for actions running that all fail from their lack of concern for their enterprise customers.

Having some independent pools of capacity for paying vs. free customers isn't rocket science, it's basic competence (or care). I'm quite sure their are competent people remaining at GitHub (although I hear most of their original folks have left, and the 2nd tier of folks who joined from microsoft seem lackluster at best). I chalk this up to lack of care, or hubris, or both.

Oh I agree that the outages are unacceptable regardless of their “social media origin”.

I also don’t buy their excuse that it’s due to increased loads due to AI. If that were the case then we’d see more patterns to the outages. But instead it affects all GitHub systems but at different times. It feels more like a problem with their orchestration layer than capacity issues.

> I've been saying this for a while, but I really wish Linear would swoop in and become the unified platform for software development.

And then, 5 years later, we are back at square one when everybody uses Linear and they start going the fate of GitHub. Self-hostable, standardized alternatives are the only real sustainable solution.

> You need centralization (or at the very least, a standard) for that.

We have a standard! It’s this great decentralized VCS called git. For most of the stuff integrations do, they’re just showing code or commits — both of which are readily available in a copy of the repo.

Probably the one thing that’s missing is a standardized webhook system so that your git repo storage could tell integrations when stuff changes. Though even that isn’t strictly necessary if the integrations keep a copy of the repo up to date.

Git is absolutely miserable without things that GitHub, GitLab, and others provide, and there's still a huge ceiling to grow into in terms of layering on UX on top of Git.

In my opinion, Git is holding software development back. Git only cares about lines of text. This is not enough in today's world.

> Git only cares about lines of text. This is not enough in today's world.

I'm working on git-inspired VCS based on syntax tree nodes stored in prolly trees. Might that be enough? I've not 100% locked down the format yet, but tentatively it looks like this: https://gist.github.com/conartist6/7dd40697140965ee343de93b9...

Why not? LLMs also only care about lines of text.

Lots of standards are terrible without the actual tools on top of them (try making an HTTP request with just a network socket).

But that doesn’t mean we should have single centralized tool that does everything.

I’d posit there’s no big loss if you broke these things up and each had their own copy the repo (if needed):

- CI/CD

- issues

- code review/pull requests

- release artifact distribution

- discovery+social credit for open source

You could host your repo on any dumb storage somewhere that speaks git+ssh or git+https and each tool could pull from there.

Completely agree. Once again, the answer is protocols, not platforms.

Other version control systems exist. It’s not git’s fault that people can’t be bothered to use the appropriate tool.

And I say this as a certified git hater.

> What makes Github special is the ecosystem and integrations. Sentry, Linear, and so many other tools […]

github didn’t start with those things. Those things came with adoption.

Its like all those people who bemoan their favourite software not existing on Linux as a reason not to switch, completely oblivious to the fact that this hegemony is the reason linux doesn’t have that software.

It’s like an appeal to the status quo - its self fulfilling, impossible to break.

I think the UX around pull requests and code reviews are extremely difficult to get right and to this day I haven't seen a platform that I'm really happy with. There are bits and pieces in some places but none really bring stuff together. Here a small list of things I'd like to see: - diffs should be language aware and highlight semantic differences - I should have a working LSP on both the old and the new version simultaneously and have decent full editor code navigation features and git history inspection available - I want ergonomic ways to see diffs between different versions of commits - I would like to be able to comment on anything (commit messages, inter diffs, PR description, responses, etc.) - I want a better integration of LLM reviews than having them dump their findings in an a big PR comment

I think there is plenty or room to innovate on just the basics of PR and codereview.

I'm with you on the pros and cons of centralization. But what makes you think if linear became the unified platform that it wouldn't just become like GitHub? See jira.

Given the history here, No matter which tool becomes the death star of developer workflow it always trends towards complexity and the challenges that come with it. Hosting your own doesn't become a panacea as most IT/ops teams also struggle with uptime and upgrades (increasingly relevant).

The only way out IMHO as customers picking two of these goliaths of sending a clear signal to them that we're happy to pay them handsomely for a stable and less sprawling product. Or a hosted open source version with a different cost structure that doesn't drive these wild swings at feature bloat and the inherent instability that comes with that chase.

I am working on a GitHub compatible API for my code forge at https://juju.bi, and thus all the existing integrations of GitHub should theoretically work with my code forge too.

i agree, and i strongly believe atproto can be the standard to allow this in a decentralized way! which is why im so excited about tangled

https://tangled.org

> What makes Github special is the ecosystem and integrations. Sentry, Linear, and so many other tools have special UX around Github. You need centralization (or at the very least, a standard) for that.

I think “a standard” is the key here. There is no reason why integrations must work through a proprietary centralized service.

Centralizations were prerequisites to have nice integrations. Yet, what used to be a precious plugin now (more than often) is a 15 min vibe coding warmup.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com