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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

  "Since April, monthly commits have grown from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion. "

Wow, that is some incredible growth in a really short time.

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For some context, in June they said commits "commits nearly doubled year over year, crossing 1.4 billion per month". Now, it has more than doubled that in just a few months.

https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...

Makes sense given the ubiquity of agentic coding. I made a joke to my coworker today that all we do is make sure AI agents can communicate with other AI agents.

It’s funny how the quality of the average commit message has gone up, now that we rarely read or write them directly anymore.

Has it? Most of the LLM-generated commit messages and PR descriptions I read are needlessly verbose and miss the point: elucidating the why of a change rather than the what. If I actually pose a question based on them the author often tells me “yea that was some AI generated nonsense, I rewrote it now”.

You may be confusing articulate and confident with useful and accurate.

They really aren't. AI commit messages are much more thorough and correct than some of the stuff I've seen humans do over the years e.g. Fix, Fixup, Fixed some Stuff, Should work now, Definitely should work now etc etc etc.

If you can’t tell how this is a non sequitur then it’s very likely you, too, confuse articulate and confident with useful and accurate.

I definitely prefer a "fixup" to a three paragraph meaningless word soup which doesn't cover why the commit is there either

Nah, most often they are just long-winded beatings around the bush.

Not really. In my experience, the average human written commit messages were almost always useless 1-3 word "Should work non" kind of messages. The agents had a low bar to clear.

So much more stuff and growing- what it is actually useful for ? Are we getting actually more done than with previous volumes or is it just all wasted energy?

You already know the answer to that question

To some extent we are getting more things done as well. In my company (mid-sized startup), they're making us push features every other day now as opposed to maybe 1-2 features per person per sprint. Back when I joined, things were a lot slower. Today, they expect freshers to push new features on day one.

But ofc, slop has increased a lot more as well.

That's very fast. Feels like you cannot really review this code so it's all just "working" AI code with few railguards and few human supervision?

Jumping on the great asymmetry of output between humans and llms, yet still being responsible for the product is pure kafka.

And how many of that features are actually used?

How long do they last until the get replaced by the next feature?

I have some big issues with this technology and the companies behind it, but I know of quite a few people personally who were not previously coders but have now been able to use LLMs to make their own custom software, solving real problems they had.

Do you believe this is a significant part of the increased GutHub traffic, people’s personal software?

Are non-coders these days aware that they should use version control (and push their code to GitHub)? Or does their agent helpfully suggest setting up a GitHub repo?

One of the things I've done is create an entire fully functional GitHub alternative that does more of what I want and hosts all of my other projects, so yes I at least am getting considerably more done.

You could have just installed Forgejo.

I’m getting a lot more done. Hobby projects that languished for years are coming along great, at quality and depth I could never have found time for before.

Same. Helping family out when I generally was too tired to do it earlier. They're all very happy too

Are they happy about the circumstances of AI too?

Higher resource consumption and the set back in CO2 reduction?

you seem to be uninformed. This should help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc

GP wasnt mentioning water consumption.

> raised heat is a kind of pollution

> water is not unlimited

> you don't want to release a bunch of acid into a river

> I know next to nothing about this

> I know basically nothing

> corn is one of the thirstiest major crops grown in the US

What is this rant supposed to inform? Whats wrong with OP being concerned about the costs of operating a DC?

Nobody is concerned about the costs and environmental impact of data centers.

When someone in a discussion about the benefits of AI goes "did you think about the environment?!", it's always performative.

The real motivation is disliking AI itself or doubt about the government's ability to offset the labor market impact. Discussions that start with feigned concerns being raised are nearly always going to be unproductive.

Wrong.

I don’t dislike AI but really of mine are negatively affected by climate change and AI isn’t helping what is easily observed when Google and MS scrapped their CO2 reduction targets.

So every time I use AI I think about the necessity and usefulness of what I‘m doing with AI and if the use outweighs the costs.

Since the rise of AI the environmental impact doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

I guess because it’s the shiny new toy of the hackernews audience.

Privacy also lost importance given the fact that the same people who refused to give information like their phone number to companies like Google and Meta now upload their whole life to their AIs to asks what should the eat, hyperbolically speaking

You're not helping your case by questioning the usefulness of software produced with AI in the same comment section, or complaining about other people supposedly compromising their own privacy in overusing AI.

The reason it doesn't matter is because the environmental impact is moderate, and the benefit obviously tremendous.

The environmental impact is anything but moderate and the benefits are not obviously tremendous at all. I'm happy using Claude Code as much as the next guy, but saying that the impact has been "tremendous" is vastly overstating the actual results.

I disagree, with the projected doubling by 2030 we're looking at 3% of global electricity consumption or 3.4 EJ, less than 1% of final energy consumption.

That is moderate. Energy-intensive industry is around 130 EJ, and global final energy consumption > 450 EJ.

Existing documented applications of today's AI have the potential to decrease energy consumption by >13 EJ/year by 2035.

Now that was about operational energy consumption. Someone might bring up manufacturing and construction.

From what I could find the climate impact of those are estimated somewhere between 10-35% of the total climate impact of data centers, so relatively small compared to the operational energy consumption.

It is very hard to justify more than moderate environmental impact here, in my opinion.

For the benefits of AI, my personal results have been great, so I am quite optimistic. And objectively, I find it hard to ignore recent results in mathematics and security research.

"Global data centers consumed around 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity—about 1.5% of the world's total electricity—with AI acting as a primary accelerator for new power demand."

https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from...

That is today where we already consume too much. If by 2030 AI's consumption doubles it gets worse. While training large models draws major initial power, everyday AI usage (inference) now drives roughly 80% to 90% of cumulative AI energy

"Existing documented applications of today's AI have the potential to decrease energy consumption by >13 EJ/year by 2035."

Seems like AI helps slowing down the rise of energy consumption.

We are at a point where we want less CO2 not moderataly more. In the end more is more.

If your doctor tells you to lose weight or you get sick it's not a success to gain weigth slower

Well, at least we could establish that the environmental impact is moderate rather than extreme.

And if the potential of >13 EJ/year is actually realized, it would seem like the net impact of the data centers is not just "moderately more CO2" but possibly "moderately less".

Please avoid low quality analogies on HN.

Please avoid acting as the judge for analogy quality.

Anything but a reduction is bad and AI is a setback for that.

Potential benefits are as long useless as they aren’t realized.

BTW the energy consumption reduction is achieved by what kind of AI? LLMs?

I'm pretty sure that most of people private data contains data about third parties too. It's more as their own privacy they compromise

What make you think I‘m talking about water consumption?

The construction of data centers needs resources and also creates more the CO2.

The energy for these data centers is often created through fossil fuels which also creates additional CO2

What do you think why Google and MS scrapped their CO2 reduction targets

A link to a YouTube video without context e.g. summary of findings, primary author/creators, and primary citations, methodology, and so on is a next to useless for making a point. For all we know you’re linking to a crackpot or an industry sock puppet and I don’t care to “watch” any of what can potentially be a dubious video or worse a malicious video. It is your job as the linker to convince me the video is worth even one iota of my time.

On the other hand recent papers highlight the validity of concern/suspicion:

> This systematic review demonstrates that the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence is a structural and increasingly consequential challenge, shaped by interdependent decisions across algorithms, software pipelines, hardware infrastructures, and deployment contexts. The synthesized evidence shows that energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with AI systems are highly variable, context-dependent, and often underestimated — Beyond Efficiency: A Systematic Review of Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint Across the AI Lifecycle (published in “Sustainability” an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal) https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/18/3/1359

"I know nothing about the subject, but I would _guess_ that the power consumption is bigger concern than the reported and studied water usage."

That's the whole 21 minute 59 second video in a nutshell.

A loud and hectic quick cut rambling video essay. Millions of views, naturally.

I’m curious, what was the application of AI that helped the family?

Most of my family are small business owners, so I've done a handful of Excel automations that they needed that generally take me a while to figure out. Landing pages and a few 3D designed prototypes that I used the Fusion 360 MCP server for

Other projects get unmaintained with maintainers burnt out by a torrent of vulberability reports

This I don't understand.

If it's not your job, then just ignore the reports.

If it's actually critical, someone will put money on the table and then it's a business. And then it's about scheduling and resourcing - also should not burn anyone out.

Just because many people have false sense of entitlement as soon as they get a free offering, it does not mean anyone needs to accommodate them.

> If it's not your job, then just ignore the reports.

If you have a highly conscientious personality, this is easier said than done.

It's also a great opportunity for character development. Use it for that, and not for trying to overbook yourself to 300%.

You don't owe the world anything at all. If you're conscientious, then give a little -- here and there. Don't turn it into an unpaid job.

" highly conscientious "

Just doing what others wish is not conscientous in itself! It _may_ be depdending on situation but it can be just pathological towards the self.

When it's psyhocologically hard to do things you imagine will dissapoint someone that's probably not concientousness. It's more like low self-esteem or codependency.

It's very hard for someone to tell these apart themselves. Hence when this topic pops out it's good idea to remind that being super-accomodating may in fact be a personality flaw - that can be healed if acknowledged.

There is very large spectrum between "trying not to dissapoint anyone" and doing what you know is the right thing.

Not everyone acts rationally even when knowing that they act irrationally.

Sounds like their problem, not something a SaaS product should dance around.

Yet they kind of did. I've limited participation in my libraries with GitHub's setting that nobody who made an account in the last 6 months can do anything in my repos (after some misguided hustler thought they're an easy target and posted an ad).lp

Time's marching forward though. Wonder what will happen after a few more months. We'll have bot spam accounts that are no longer as fresh.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

A great majority of business applications do run on open source projects, and in turn, are affected by them if things go awry. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma in this case.

usual crying from the usual people. AI slop, blahblahb, ...

(I don't mean you. just these so called open source developers.)

I'm not sure if it's going to persuade you but here is an example:

https://github.com/uclouvain/openjpeg

Basically the only library for reading jp2k data (complicated specs, ask your AI to one shot an implementation, mine said "it's 3000 lines of fiddly spec, too complicated"). Issues full of buffer-overflows. Recently unmaintained.

Used in tons of projects, now all possibly vulnerable.

and? don't use it. switch. abandon.

did we lose anything of value? probably not.

Same!

It's starting to become a cliché to have people reply "I'm getting a lot more done", but without seeing any evidence of this incredible productivity gains, I'm starting to wonder if y'all are suffering from collective hallucination. If the accepted claims are of "100x productivity" (increasing by the day), and LLMs have gotten very good for the past ~year, for sake of argument, where are the 100 year improvements in the status quo of software?

If one claims such extraordinary figures of 100x increased productivity, a step forward never seen in the history of humanity in such short timespans, they must present extraordinary proof or be branded as a complete lunatic. I could have accepted people saying "I'm 20% more productive", which is an incredible achievement by itself, but not the 10x, 20x, 100x I keep hearing about. I think I've read 200x this week.

I've heard people use the same word, I was dubious but they did produce some stuff, yet I think that it ends up as an itch-project. You're satisfied you saw the thing emerge into existence but that's about it. No more drive after that. Maybe because LLM don't require you to have a real long term intense need for that thing.

This is exactly my experience. A month of excitement building something that I wouldn’t have had time to do myself, then something broke in the setup and my motivation didn’t extend to fixing it.

I’m only back at it four months later and I don’t really know what happened before, or why it’s working now, I’m just happy that I can scratch that itch again.

> I could have accepted people saying "I'm 20% more productive", which is an incredible achievement by itself, but not the 10x, 20x, 100x I keep hearing about. I think I've read 200x this week.

The ratios are factual though. Just look at the "Insights" tab of any LLM written project. https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulse

This kind of velocity is impossible to achieve manually.

velocity - maybe. usefulness? Maybe even easier. As they say data is not information. Commits are not (necessarily) anything useful.

That’s a measure of lines of code, I suspect the parent is talking about what results those LOC create.

AI built me a 1.5k+ LOC react component which is probably a 15x increase on the file size I would have created, with negative impact on the project for those extra LOC.

> where are the 100 year improvements in the status quo of software?

Most software work is just churn / doing the same thing over and over. More productivity can just mean more output, not better output.

The analogy here would be : a kid who wants a toy but does not have money. So he keeps dreaming how he some day would get that toy and how he would play with it and how it would make him happy, but times goes by and he still does not have money to get that toy. Then suddenly along comes LLM and you have infinite money to buy you all the toys that you wanted, you get them, but you now don't have time to play with them. Because time is money and just like before you didn't had time to "buy" the toys, now that you have them you still have no time to play with them.

I think using AI often feels faster than it is because you put less thought and effort into the problem yourself.

Another possibility is that the people who experience these 100x productivity increases are honest, correct, and simply had abysmal productivity which has now been increased to near-average junior levels thanks to AI.

The variance is extreme though. Thanks to Claude Code and Codex I've been able to make several non-trivial internal tools and libraries without writing much in terms of code, just some reviews here and there.

I spent a couple of days on those, and its would have taken me months to write manually I am sure, so in that regards it's close to 50x.

I've also had Claude track down some logic issue in a module I was unfamiliar with which had very large and complicated flows. Would have taken me many days, since I did not have a reproducible case, so had to go by logs and customer description alone. I spent 5 minutes writing a prompt and when I checked back, Claude had identified the issue. The fix I had to implement myself, but was fairly easy. So there Claude definitely was a 100x increase in productivity.

Then there are cases where they're much more modest, or where they might even be negative, when they think they're fixing stuff but actually are introducing more bugs.

Hey, traditional hand coder fellow ... the times have past and the future is already a present. I never have been this productive before, and it's been ~20 years that I spent coding. System level programming. Few years back I would have said the bottleneck is not in spelling out the code so we wouldn't see that much AI impact but boy I was wrong. Writing code has never been this cheap, both in terms of time resources and $$$. Now I can iterate over the ideas I didn't have the capacity before, both intellectual and time-wise.

> I never have been this productive before

So, what are you doing/ have done with all your productivity?

writing code by hand of course /s

Enjoying free time that otherwise I wouldn't have. Building stuff that otherwise I wouldn't have time or resources for.

You can accept what you like, but it's true. Our team and our business is incredibly more productive. The number of new valuable customer facing features, and the number of PRs (which represent REAL work, not taking a PR and splitting it into 200 PRs game) have all increased dramatically. We've shipped something like ~10x more PRs so far this year than all last year. And we've done that without increasing the number of bugs and outages.

Great, number go up. Have the features led to actual customer growth, or just increased productivity?

Yes lots and lots of growth.

Best code is the one that you have not written :) Because the goal is not the code , it is the things that code does, and if it can be done without code, its the best code. Also if you produce lots of code that does not do anything in reality, then its worst code.

And yes, we can rebut that with "time you enjoy wasting is not wasted" except of course some externalities, like boiling earths oceans.

But what about my pet project? The one that I just do for the fun o seeing AI go brrrr, do you mean now I should care about the Earth?

Note: It's sarcasm.

More done + more leisure.

That's how it's sold, but have you heard about any major tech company that sends their worker home when they've achieved what they used to achieve pre-AI?

EDIT: Instead of simply down-voting, you're welcome to name examples that proves me wrong ;)

This is anecdotal, but I know that a lot of my coworkers and coasting and putting up one AI generated PR per day which they've hardly even self reviewed.

In a good company that will come back to bite them next performance review.

So, if it doesn't then you learned something about your workplace (and it's not good).

> In a good company that will come back to bite them next performance review.

In a good company that should be discussed in the next 1:1s so actual change can happen meanwhile. If it just waits for the end of year review, then it's not a good company.

Sure. I meant if they are stubborn.

Middle management was all cut so all managers have 30 direct reports and "Don't have time" to do more than a couple 1:1s per year.

These individuals are demonstrating that they can be replaced with AI. I worry for them.

The only way that you can translate productivity gains into more free time in a salaried position is by working remotely. Seems obvious, no?

Is it used afterwards or done and forgotten?

Really? https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/ai-promised-to-free-up-wo...

Has anyone noticed an increase in the quality, performance or capabilities of the software they use?

Only in software that is used to make other software. So we're all just patting ourselves on the back within our bubble.

What I have noticed an increase though is in demands and pressure to deliver.

I have. Mostly for the software I use that I maintain myself though :P

I have. In fact, some of my hand rolled stuff is actually _provably_ faster and more secure then even heavily battletested and widely used "industry standard" solutions. This is mainly due to them passing an exhaustive barrage of millions of lines of code of tests (literally, in fact I just did a pass over all my tests/ dirs and it's sitting at 6.3 million as of today) ranging from adversarial CVE probing attacks to fuzz tests. Ironically, my same testing suite has caught _numerous_ bugs in production stacks (openSSL/libuv) particularly, literal hard SIGSEGVs and the like.

On CVE probing, and I haven't really seen anyone describe/use it (or I may be oblivious), but the way you do it is you curate a list of CVEs for the class of software you're writing, say a web server. Then you take this list in chunks and hand them off to your agents to devise and implement adversarial technically analogous attacks against your codebase. If it's red, report and patch. Ironically (even with Fable 5) it's never complained/refused to do it.

My unsupervised agentic setup has built something that I wanted for decades but never built, so I guess that’s an increase in capabilities.

I play modded Starfield. There's been a clear increase in mods lately. Some of them are from self-proclaimed non-programmers who are using the LLM's to reverse engineer the game or other abandoned mods, and they've started to create new cool mods or they've fixed various engine limitations. Can confirm that these actually work and I can finally have my 1000+ modlist.

There was a huge exodus of existing programmers/modders ~two years ago, due to paid mods and what not. The gamers took over with their LLM tools.

I'm writing much more secure software and infrastructure (e.g. IAM now gets configured well).

Well, many of the saas I use continue to have problem meeting their SLA. And I’m on support just as often as always trying to get through to a human to file a bug that will never get fixed. “It’s in our roadmap”.. no it isn’t. Even with LLMs, product will focus on making new features to push their AI mission.

At my company, we are using AI to clean up huge amounts of technical debt that would have just hung around otherwise, so yes. I'm not sure that your average user would notice, but we do without a doubt have a much better product now.

That’s like asking whether fuel consumption was productive or leisure as the number of cars on the road increased. It’s both! I don’t think you can separate one from the other in any reasonable way.

LOL, this kind of things will happen when projects like Bun (https://github.com/oven-sh/bun) are running on auto. :)

3.3k open issues holy shit

Strange to think they are probably triaged by LLMs at this point

AI finding issues in code and reporting them so that an AI can review and triage them for another AI to fix.

I mean, isn't that the dream?

I don't know if that's sarcasm or not. I know it doesn't work, but that's the future we've been promised, right?

Who promised it?

It's certainly someone's dream: https://devhumor.com/media/dilbert-s-team-writes-a-minivan

If the same AIs don't hallucinate and create bugs in the first place.

I don't know how much my own time is wasted on Claude imagining API response formats that never existed.

Not my dream…

Let's just say my dream does not involve babysitting some robot

> I mean, isn't that the dream?

Unironically: no.

Why it doesn't work? It is working for me. It is working for bun. It is working for others who actually embraces it and puts in the work to get it working.

sadly someone didn't have free unlimited Fable and Opus like Bun team does

I recognize your username from other comment threads and would classify you as a bun fanatic, but even so, I’d hold off on saying, “it’s working for bun,” until 1.4.0 has been out of canary for, like, more than 24 hours. Most real users haven’t onboarded to it yet.

so first it was rust rewrite bad. Then rewrite with ai can never work. Then it will be riddled with bugs. It'll crash. It'll take years to fix.

On the other hand, rewrite was mostly done in record time. New version added massive number of features. Also huge bug fixes. Being used by Claude code by millions of people. Successfully used by some others even in canary. After release, multiple companies immediately switched due to massive amounts of resource savings and performance gains (and publicly posted about it).

Can there still be problems? Yes, I'm sure there will be. But denying the feat Oven pulled off with Bun in last few months is nothing but phobia/fud.

Many people are already posted about testing new bun version and I have yet to see a single post where the issue is the latest versions of bun. In some cases people posted it doesn't work but that's due to node compatibility etc and it didn't work on previous version either.

One does not need to be bun fanatic to see and call things as they are.

PS: I like bun because I hate how js ecosystem requires 100s of packages to do anything and bun is aiming to include batteries. This is good.

That seems to be what's happening. Like 2-4 bots talking to each other, then Jarred Sumner just does the final merge with little comment.

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/39743 https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/39735

github-actions: "If you need a paragraph-long comment to justify why the workaround is OK, the code is wrong — fix the code"

robobun: "The ordering is load-bearing: reclaiming before this block made is_dead_request true and hung a parked textStream read (caught by body.test.ts in CI). The comment pins that constraint."

Ah, well, if something is load-bearing, then I guess that settles it. Need a comment to pin that constraint, in case a read is parked. These are words that normal humans commonly use in these ways.

(Always striking how much Claude obsesses over the minutiae of method contracts and side effects, exhaustively documenting them in comments. It’s much happier figuring out how to reorder some method calls with nonobvious side effects so the code works than it is refactoring them not to do unexpected things!)

And 5K PRs. I'm crying.

> 5k PRs

Wow, is Bun the record holder for number of PRs?

I recall GitHub recommends to keep the number of PR to a certain level due things such as GitHub Actions slowing down.

Nixpkgs has 11k open PRs at the moment (a lot of them routine version bumps and such), so no. But then Nixpkgs isn’t a piece of software in the conventional sense: the monorepo does contain a few of those, but most of it is a giant collection of basically-independent build scripts.

that's the interesting part : forges are being abused.

Sure AI workflows might be a non-negligible share of all that usage but still the point is that initially forges existed to help developers collectively share a state then solve problems. Nowadays they are basically online filesystems with better notifications for other software to interact with and only optionally developers actually communicating.

You never could scale tulip buds so quickly - progress! ;-)

and all of high quality

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/39797

And...? It just shows how active and big the project is.

More than 50% of the recent commits are from robobun, jesus

It's AI all the way down.

An issue reported by a person account but post made by AI. https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/39800

AI (robobun) responds and creates PR. https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/37459

AI (coderabbit, claude, github actions) review the PR, AI (robobun) applies the fixes.

Some AI back and forth.

A human finally merges the PR.

Not gonna lie, it's kind of beautiful.

Some guy, profiling his linux distro, wonders why ssh connections are a few hundred milliseconds slower than expected, finds there PR introduced and RCE backdoor and p0wns the whole project.

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

Seriously, this is driving me insane. The XZ hack told us what we had to do to secure our supply chain, and instead we went ahead and implemented a worldwide standard for NLP-to-action and figured we'd worry about the guardrails later. Mad.

As it should be if not more. What's wrong with it?

Here's the most recent nontrivial one as of this comment: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/d4de65e9a43224a14591ad...

The code change makes no sense and should do nothing. The commit message described a very deep investigation into garbage collection on the C++ side. Some object is being kept alive when the test requires it to be collected, and changing the code in this way allegedly prevents that. But wouldn't you think there would be a better way to ensure an object gets collected, like setting the variable to null?

The comments in the code don't make a lot of sense either. Something so obscure and brittle has to be explained extremely clearly.

While the issue might be real, this commit is so far away from the locus of normal that it's sending red alert. Plus a hallucination is very likely with such a long investigation - once an LLM agent starts investigating it just assumes there is a problem. And this is the 1 out of 1 robobun commit that I looked at.

Edit: here's the next one: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/72ec6e2594892455df0090...

Make sure the fs module keeps working if someone freezes or seals its exports table. I was wondering who was going around freezing random tables from other modules, so I checked the linked issue - robobun reported the issue, too. Why? I'm skeptical of whatever robobun was doing when it decided that it was necessary for code outside of a module to freeze their export tables. It needs a very good justification.

The first is, annoyingly, a relatively common problem and solution when dealing with GC lifetimes in tests. Few interpreters/JITs want to generate extra instructions to null out stack slots or pre clobber registers to ensure something becomes collectible at a specific point. Eager nulling of a variable often gets removed by dead store elimination or even just from being a disconnected SSA node. I've written extra nested scopes or wrappers in Java to deal with this in tests.

Don't know anything about the second one.

If this is needed in tests it needs to be known how it works, it needs to work consistently, and it needs to be documented how it works. It can't be an ad-hoc deep investigation and random fix each time. The comment should then be just // ensure foo is no longer a GC root, see gc_roots.md

It needs a comment for sure. I always write a little helper utility to manage that when I need it.

This will result in pretty low quality software.

I've had opus 5 along with its AI code reviewer agree to do some pretty stupid shit.

Opus 5 is a trash model

Opus 5 is only usable when Sol is reviewing its output.

Wait till you see what some people agree to.

Ah the good old "AI isn't bad because people are bad too" argument

Wow...

I am currently using bun, but may have to switch. I can't see how this can possibly turn out well in the long run...

It really is. I know I've gone from tens a month to thousands a month. They have to be projecting >100B/month in the next year or two.

wow. they should really institute a maximum amount of individual pushes per-month per-user.

Which will just increase the cries of "enshittification" and hasten the mass migration to the next free platform that surely, this time, won't ever go down.

We're small enough that we've been hosting our git infra for about a year now, I wonder how many other companies figured out they could make the trade. I've had a Github since a couple years after they started and I think they are going to become a Stack Overflow, albeit slower with MS at the helm. If Github is going to be 99% slop it's going to be really hard to use as a fun tool to show what you can do, what you've worked on, side projects, etc. I took github off my resume and I'm probably not going to relaunch my weblog if I end up job hunting, too much low-effort crap and people basically copying what a lot of us had been doing manually for years to really feel like it's anything other than a negative signal.

Ironically a bunch of people already migrated to Codeberg and then Codeberg announced "heads up, we actually don't want your AI slop, we're for real projects only" and AI coders threw a shitfit on HN.

That would just drive users into the arms of the alternatives, which would love to own the world's code... like Cursor/Musk.

Microsoft and GitHub's only option is to suck it up, absorb this growth, and lower failure rates. They have the money, so that's not the issue.

As someone on the sidelines, this is really interesting to watch unfold.

Well either they can handle this load that Microsoft can't, or they can't. If Microsoft are going to continue to be unreliable in the absence of the rate limit then:

If alternatives can handle the load, those who would consider those alternatives if Microsoft opposed a rate limit are likely to move to them anyway.

If alternatives aren't able to manage, then user's aren't going to jump since those services won't actually provide more usage.

I think the number of commits is a red herring, but that said, I wonder how spiky their load is.

Imagine a fee over X commits, but only during certain hours. I can imagine 90% of the commits over 6 or 8 timezones, maybe 50% over 4 right now...

It's not a red herring, every commit necessitates a database hit.

I was thinking the same thing at first: ideas to increase product limits on GitHub, to increase reliability given limited infra.

However, there are sharks in the water, and with the diminishing mean of user technical knowledge, the product actually needs to become even more free. GitHub likely needs even lower friction.

"All it takes" is the insanely heavy technical lift to support that. There is no other solution. All the C-Suite needs to do is foster an environment with well-thought through, and possibly over-funded engineering, at the edge of the art. That sounds like an amazing challenge.

Why would any company want coding data now? It's all garbage. I'd be surprised if anything past 2025 is even used for training.

Me personally, I would like to own the world's code.

The richest man in the world is interested in this dataset as well.

There's nothing special about code here - if you can own the world's $X for any X, you win capitalism.

Let me add one more reply here.

Even if I accepted that given the new repos: all the new code = "It's all garbage." - I would certainly love to be in a position to observe the new code + metadata = software trends, as software eats the remaining world.

I don't think anyone would love to own the world's AI slop. The capex and revenue expenditure would be too high for any ROI.

If you use GitHub as just a software forge then sure you can find an alternative. But I suspect more people use GitHub for its social aspects and they will stick around despite the regressions because building an alternative to an established social network is incredibly difficult if not impossible.

You can get work done on any software forge. But potential employers will still ask for your GitHub. People will judge your personal project by its GitHub stars and be less reluctant to download a binary from GitHub than elsewhere. Potential contributors will leave a PR on GitHub but probably not if they have to make an account on a new platform and learn how it works.

And of course, let's not assume any competitor can just absorb even a fraction of the traffic GitHub receives without suffering similar reliability issues.

I still remember when they decided to limit the number of private repos you could have as a free user. Kind of silly to me at the time, and even more so now!

I remember when you had to pay for private repos in the first place.

Initially there were no private repos for free users at all, it was a selling point for bitbucket that they offered that.

I don't think it's silly for free users to be restricted. If you want something, pay for it. Free trials are trials.

so... when you reach your monthly limit in the middle of the month, what is the recourse?

Or, is the idea just to drive everyone away from your platform?

Uh, pay money for the service you're using constantly?

I would give the growth hacker on their team a big raise, these KPIs are incredible

Why is Github talking about number of commits here, and not pushes? Are there a lot of tools/people using github as an online editing platform?

I'm not following your line of questioning. Without ever using github as an online editing platform, you can do one push with two new commits.

Commits are not expensive, pushes are. You can do any number of commits before you do one push, unless you are editing online, in which case every act is it's own commit & push.

You can rig up a local ide to pathologically commit+push per save, but you can do literally anything, so what you can do is immaterial.

>You can rig up a local ide to pathologically commit+push per save

The dev system we use for a 3rd party hosting provider (a big one) requires a commit and push for every file save while we're developing. I created a build system for this that copies the whole repo to a temp folder. As we save changes to files in the main repo folder, the build system watches for changes and copies the changed file to the temp folder, then does a commit on the temp folder and pushes to a an intermediary repo in github which then triggers an action that causes the 3rd party system to update from the intermediary repo. This way we don't pollute our main source repo with a commit every time we save an update to a source file.

It's not my favorite way to develop but it's caused us no real problems except when github goes down.

> requires a commit and push for every file save

I don’t think I could imagine a stupider idea than this if I tried. To paraphrase Babbage: I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a solution.

meh, it's just external undo button. It's useful. It might or might not be worth the cost, but it's not that it delivers no value or causes some harm (other than cost/reliability)

https://delta.dev/

Do you have some GitHub architectural knowledge you’d like to share with us?

A push pushes commits and blobs and trees and tags. It’s an interesting metric to track, but the core unit of complexity (and expense) worth tracking on GitHub’s side is obviously the commit.

There’s a difference between pushing 1 commit and 100.

> There’s a difference between pushing 1 commit and 100.

There isn’t much. GitHub doesn’t run actions separately for each commit. It runs them on pushes. I’m trying to think of a thing that would happen for each commit in each push and coming up blank.

It does things like scan for references to issues to index, but it would just scan the log for a range.

I did disagree with GP though because there is no reason to assume that the ratio of commits to pushes has materially changed. So if that is the proxy they have always used for measuring growth, and they know it reliably does that then I think it’s a reasonable way to communicate this to this audience.

> It runs them on pushes

Sure, because pushes are how you update a reference. That’s really what triggers an action: a reference changing. And there could be a bunch of those in a push.

A commit costs storage, you’ve got secret scanning, it needs to be indexed in a way that can be referenced in commit messages and comments, a commit message itself can close issues or reference other PRs, stored and served individually and immediately via the web UI or git clients, etc etc.

It’s also like… the core unit of git.

None of the things you mention - indexing or secret scan would be done individually for each commit. As I already said, this would be a log of all commits in the range pushed - it would be scanned once for those things. There is no need for a loop running over a range of commits and processing each one.

There 100% is at least for things like secret scanning and message parsing.

Secret scanning needs to make sure my repo as a whole has no secrets. It’s not acceptable to have 1 commit introducing it and 1 removing it because the secret is still recoverable.

Every commit is also surely an entry in a database somewhere. I can navigate in GitHub directly to any individual commit so there is definitely some overhead of some type.

You are right about secret scanning, but its worth noting that is only enabled by default on public repositories. It is an extra paid feature for organizations on a teams or enterprise subscription, and isn't available at all for individual owned repositories outside of an enterprise subscription.

And yes, I agree there is indexing of commits, but that is a batch insert from a log.

It's not necessary to perform secret scanning on a per-commit basis. The most efficient way is to just scan all blob objects being pushed; there is no reason to even be aware of an object's location (tree path or commit) except for diagnostic messages.

> I can navigate in GitHub directly to any individual commit

You can do the same with the git command line client. The overhead you claim is already in the git on-disk format. Github might very well duplicate this information in a database somewhere, but it doesn't follow from your observation.

Exactly. You can have 3000 commits in a branch, and unless you don't push each of them one by one, shouldn't be a problem the number.

GH processes at the commit level for things (including actions) even though they're bundled in a push... it's relevant to the load on their infrastructure.

But they can't process the commit until I push it?

A push containing 100 commits is more expensive than a push containing 1 commit.

But is it 100x more expensive?

Probably? If you do 100 pushes instead, there is roughly zero additional data. At best you'd be comparing cache costs, which probably are lper for one large push, but there's a ton of calculation and CI that runs per commit regardless of other data being cached.

Why don’t you have your actions run on pr or push instead of on commit? Why would you even want that? I’ve never seen actions set up that way. If I push a branch with 100 commits then it’ll only run CI once. It’ll show the rest of the commits in the UI, sure, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the same performance impact. It could very well be 1 db transaction with multiple rows written instead of 100. I think you’re reducing this problem too much without knowing their architecture.

Github runs CI per PR push (obviously), and per main-branch commit (click on commit history in any project with CI, see a build result check mark on each one - that's true if you push a dozen commits too (I've done that)), in nearly all setups I've seen. I'm not sure how much of that is required vs default though.

With enough effort, you can rather obviously run CI per PR commit (it's a programmable system), but I've never seen aUI-integrated way to track the results, aside from browsing custom job names, which is very far from what I'd call "integrated" when compared to PR-level build markers. Similarly, I'm not aware of (but would not be surprised by) any way to disable per-main-branch commit builds, aside from initial pushes.

But I haven't poked around deeply in the settings, and business-account settings are rather different anyway so those might be wildly different / more flexible / more obtuse in exciting ways. Github is a very large and complicated product at this point, darn near anything could exist if you dive through enough UI layers or use old URLs to find soft-deprecated features.

Also, honestly, 100 commits = 1 transaction? That's far more of an over-simplification than anything I've said. It's a massive product with thousands of engineers, there's no chance at all it's just one database.

Things like password scanning have to look per object uploaded

In what way? If I have multiple local commits pushed once I expect to see CI type actions to run once for the push rather than for ever commit in the push.

This is configurable in Github Actions. Many projects want to run CI for each commit to avoid situations where one commit breaks the build and the commit after in the same push or PR fixes it. Broken commits in the history makes bisecting harder.

Interesting, never realized that was an option. Thanks!

Bigger numbers sound more impressive.

"Our billion-dollar infrastructure crumbles under a tremendous flood of 50 PRs per second" would just sound embarrassing.

Truly incredible in every sense of the word.

It's almost double. If you have scaling prepared, it should be linear, but I doubt they've prepared for this.

they are/were in the middle of a migration

Oh the productivity increase.

I feel it in my fingers. I feel it in my veins.

this is impressive too

"We have since added more than 3 million CPU cores, 120 petabytes of high-speed storage, and significant network capacity"

It's like cancer growth though, not the 'good' kind of growth ;) E.g. I doubt that the number of Github users has doubled in that month too. Github should probably introduce daily commit- and merge-limits that slow down excessive clanker activity, but are high enough that a human doesn't notice. Alternative put users with excessive resource usage on their own 'sub-infrastructure' so that when this is overloaded, the regular users are not affected by the outage.

Not really. It's AI commits. Not quality commits.

it doesn't matter though, commits create load in their system

One has to wonder what the point of a collaborative version control system even is if the software we’re writing is one-shotted by a call to an API ?

the infrastructure does not care about the quality of the commits, just that a commit happened.

A lot of human commits are low quality

Because human commits ar necessarily quality?

no but AI commits are necessarily not

I mean if I set up a for loop spamming my own SAAS it would be incredible growth too

Not that impressive when you realize it's mostly due to AI slop

edit: AI actually writes 99.9% of my code these days. I'm just saying of course the number of commits to github is going to climb astronomically due to AI.

Impressive for whom? It's impressive for the service to have such growth at that scale, the code being slop is somewhat irrelevant. Your comment just seems like mood affiliation (AI should be dismissed, growth was from AI, therefore growth should be dismissed).

How is it impressive if we all know it's autogenerated? There's no more people there than there were before. Heck, at ~2x growth that's possibly a decrease in real humans there since bots generate loads of them per person

It's an impressively large quantity of X, not an impressively good X.

That's not how I read the statement "It's impressive for the service to have such growth at that scale" that this was a reply to. They do seem to think the growth is impressive, not the absolute quantity, about which I agree with you

Yeah, seems like AI slop is going to kill GitHub's free tier. I just don't see how the economics of having to host this much slop and provide service to slopcoders is going to convert into dollars for them otherwise. None of the humans involved are going to end up in big enterprises. It's all cost, with no pathway to revenue.

> there's no more people there than there were before

Seems false. Lots of coding adjacent people, engineering managers, etc. are now pushing PRs.

> How is it impressive if we all know it's autogenerated?

Nobody is saying the code is impressive, just the growth of github is impressive. It's not doing anythign different based on the source of the code.

Is it impressive? All it's doing is decaying the services. 15 years ago never have imagined I would go to the lengths to host a github alternative on a VPS but after doing just this (also being the last one in the my professional group to do so), GitHub is giving a master class in destroying their reputation in pursuit of advocating for hostile entities.

Not all growth is good, especially growth that is actively hurting the company.

There is an equilibrium in both nature and software. Purposely designing systems that mimic the effects of cancer is going to benefit who exactly?

This growth is surely good for github. If another company becomes the "github for AI agents", they'll lose not just their business for AI but also human coders. (Sure, maybe there will be a human coder only github, but it will be quite small.)

LLM companies are already wildly unprofitable. Who ever wants to do this can be my guest, but please let's tax them enough so that we can get something positive out of the stupidity like free public school lunches for children or universal childcare.

I don't know how to delete things.

And what would be the expected result (other than spending $20 a month)?

Automated slop?

I wrote a list of things that makes us money, but I decided that I like having less competition. Now to see if I can delete my original post.

Agree - this reminds me very much of the old joke of two economists increasing GDP by taking turns giving the same 200usd back and forth for having each other eat shit.

Useful / impressive for whom is the question. Not for us!

We pay for Github enterprise, and because GH can't be bothered to separate service tiers for sloplords and actual paying customers we get garbage level performance. They could of course always implement usage limits, but the goal is not to earn money, or provide a good service, the goal is to maximize AI users. Would be very awkward at the next executive golf meetup if you couldn't point to increased AI adoption.

In short: This is why monopoly laws matter. Once a company becomes too large, normal business rationales cease to be the motivation for their actions, and GH can go along with the pied piper of AI psychotic C-suite officers like MS is doing instead.

They do. Talk to your account representative for the alternate domain name to hit.

Should use on premises.

Should use Forgejo

alot of distributed systems in big companies grow at this rate, its not exponential, its mundane

When a service that was already the primary git hosting provider for most of the world for 20 years grows at that rate its not mundane and its not comparable to any example.

AWS saw this growth every year for two decades, hyper growth tech sees it all the time

The absolute number doesn’t matter nearly as much as the change in rate of growth. The number of commits had not been doubling every six months at GitHub for a long time.

At Amazon if traffic volume consistently doubled every six months that is actually quite a lot easier to plan for, it just becomes part of everything they do from very early on.

im not buying that github is a unique engineering problem, harder than the rest of hyperscalars.

No one said it is unique. But if you take an infrastructure and engineering org that had been growing at 10% a year for a decade, you are going to have a different set of capabilities and practices in place. Adapting to a new reality of doubling every few months will predictably produce failures anywhere. GitHub is not unique in that regard.

ive spent 15 years in big tech companies, this problem is common and its why they pay engineers 500k-1M. this happens at meta literally all the time.

half of engineering in big tech is just rewriting a system to scale

microsoft is incompetent, they havent changed windows/excel/outlook in 30 years

Tell me about the time that an app at Meta grew at 10% a year for a decade and then began doubling every few months.

its probably happened on half the core teams, idk what you want me to say, it sounds like you dont have alot of experience

Don't dodge the question and attack the asker, that's rude.

Can you give an example?

Instagram, Facebook and even threads all had much more mundane growth rates and definitely no unexpected jumps like GitHub is experiencing. I'm sure if suddenly the solar system had 10 more earths with each about 10 billion people and they would all start using Instagram tomorrow we would have exactly the same growing pains and outages that GitHub has today.

Luckily for Meta agents are not yet as much into doomscrolling as humans are.

instagram growth rate != core service team in instagram growth rate

They have what amounts to an unlimited budget for AI spend. If it’s so fantastic, why can’t they let it crawl over every piece of their codebase, every metric, every log, and spot these problems before they occur?

“We misconfigured a sidecar” is something I would think AI could quite easily find and fix.

I don't know who you are responding to. I haven't made any statements about what AI can do for them. I would expect AI is making the situation worse, like it is in many dysfunctional tech organizations.

> AWS saw this growth every year for two decades

That does not seem to be true - which two-decade period are you talking about? AWS has only been around for ~20 years, and I just reviewed a 10 year period, and not a single one of those years saw doubling in the whole year, let alone doubling in a few months. Which 20 year period are you referring to, and are you referring to doubling every few months over that 20 year period?

AWS saw doubling in usage every month for 240 months? So it now exceeds the number of atoms in the universe?

Eh, I would be more empathic in this situation[0].

Github isn’t small startup, where other 10x threshold is as cheap as buy bigger box in your IaaS.

When you are already biggest player in the ecosystem and you suddenly get 10x persisted traffic, with at least 30x+ forecast “soon” - I am not surprised they have issues.

[0] even at current MS owned github

cloud providers and hyper growth tech deal with these growth rates all the time

Did you read the article? It is growing exponential.

this is common at AWS/cloud providers

Not sure to be honest, from a machine perspective 2X should never be a big deal, unless 1.4 was the threshold or sweet state and no one thought too much about scale and architecture beyond that

If you’re the size of GitHub and you’ve been running your infra for years with very little variation in traffic patterns you have a strong incentive to optimise costs for that existing behaviour.

I am afraid thats now how infrastructure works from what I have seen. The number that really matters is QPS. For any system the QPS varies through out the day and across the week and months. Most design considerations easily absorb any 2X increase. Pick up any company and the chances are that the servers are over provisioned, no one takes chances specially with critical components.

What you have going on with Github is mix of multiple things. Traffic alone is not the cause from what little I know, it does adds to the problem for sure

1. Infrastructure is being moved to use Azure, and overall all the cloud providers are struggling with hardware at the moment (same is going on for linkedin too)

2. The core teams, the people who knew the existing systems have either been laid off or moved from Github

3. Microsoft veterans are brought in to fill the gap across the board, they are trying their best but its a lot of unknown for them

How much infra have you seen of the top 100 sites in the world? I've worked on multiple top 10, and absorbing a 2x increase (and the peak is very likely more than 2x) is a very very hard problem that would cause hundreds of pagers to go off and load shedding to very high degrees. There is just not tons of unused capacity lying around in wait at the scale of github. "No one takes chances with critical components" is also very wrong for the simple fact that you don't know which is the weakest link in the chain until it fails.

I have some good experience and I feel bad about state of these things too specially given that a lot of it could have been prevented. What you have here is not a single service, its a system compromised of hundreds of services, possibly without clear ownership for some of them after these many years and reorgs. There is not a single person or group that understands the whole system from technical standpoint and pressure points. It akin to people trying to plug the holes as the water starts getting under pressure from different joints. This duct taping is present in almost all big enough systems, you name them.

> "No one takes chances with critical components" is also very wrong for the simple fact that you don't know which is the weakest link in the chain until it fails.

  These companies were built and run by people passionate enough for the craft, ones who cared for the systems, who designed them. There is this idea that you can replace people by process and everyone is replaceable. What you have is a classical state where people are just doing their time.

Sure, but the new patterns are several years old at this point.

Not adapting is a choice

If you grow 2x a month, you'll run out of resources very soon. Like the whole Solar System.

Hey, um. Little bit of math. Exponential growth.

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