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Comment by toephu2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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