GitHub's new dashboard experience now the default | Hacker News Reader

GitHub's new dashboard experience now the default

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74 pointsvanyauhalin94 comments

A lot of people seem to be complaining, but the last iteration had Copilot at the top and then a "Feed" of what other people were doing.

This seems to push your issues and pull requests as the main items of the page, and that's significantly better.

So complaining works then?

I think credit should be given where credit is due when Github’s just made a good change.

Complaining might work, but continuous complaining is tiresome.

This could be compressed into "I think Github made a good change."

Pretend that there is a different set of people complaining about this change than the last one, and that common to both sets are people who don't think either are good.

For OSS work, I actually rather like finding out what other people I follow are up to.

A list of tasks I'm already behind on is the last thing I want to be reminded of constantly.

The feed is still there, but imo it’s not the default thing many people wanna see when visiting the dashboard. I understand that people want the feed, but this weird social network thing isn’t really the true purpose of Github in 2026, and I would bet Github has the data on that and decided that what people really want to see when they first open .com is the status of their own work.

I'm not complaining, just offering a different PoV. :)

> This seems to push your issues and pull requests as the main items of the page, and that's significantly better.

Maybe we aren't at the bottom of the pile of trash, but we are still in a pile of trash. It's a page that, objectively speaking, doesn't work like it says it does. Things simply do not work. This isn't a "I don't like it" problem. This is the page literally says one thing and does the opposite.

And yes, it "seems" to push your issues and PRs as the main items of the page. Keyword there is seems. Nothing on that new page helps me work on the projects I'm working on. But there is a PR I opened for my project back in Jan still open on that page? And more importantly, no way to resolve it from that page?

No real developer designed this. It's trash. Maybe not the bottom of the heap, but it's still trash. I'd be ashamed to put this out.

> but the last iteration had Copilot at the top

It still does. And for some reason, when you start typing, you aren't typing in that chatbox. Instead... you start typing in search even though search has a / to type there.

It's bad. It's really bad. And so much wasted space. I'm sorry, but expect some level of quality. Don't just accept trash that literally doesn't work.

They removed the old "feed" many years ago, still prefer seeing what cool things others are interested in. It's been a deteriorating platform since Microsoft acquisition (imo)

If this is the new default, can we get rid of the blue dot in the top right now?

Of course not, LLMs need to put dots everywhere. Pulsing dots? Even better.

It's great to add new features, but couldn't GitHub fix the essential ones first?

Just this week, I encountered the following problems:

- a diff showing "0 files changed" while there are many [1];

- suggested changes in a PR not rendering the original line [2];

- bug trackers not showing more than the 40th page [3].

Might seem nitpicky but it was just over the last week... I have a whole bunch of other bugs on my mind, and unfortunately, it's only gotten worse over the years. To the point where I almost don't care anymore.

[1] https://github.com/PokeAPI/sprites/pull/284#issuecomment-585...

[2] https://github.com/Delgan/loguru/pull/1516#discussion_r41268...

[3] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182925

I suspect it's the huge amount of requests they get and more so now with AI. Some estimates put traffic at 3-5x what it was just a year ago.

If GH.com is anything like GHE, the number of moving parts is staggering.

Speaking of github in the age of AI, I heard a rumor from another partner of their parent company that fixing those things should be easy with AI, that the AI that they have now is so terrifyingly good that people shouldn't be allowed to use some of it without a license, and that the stuff they're holding back is far better than even that.

Seeing as they have infinity tokens to spend on godlike secret AI, isn't it weird that those same bugs are still sitting on the bugtracker? Shouldn't Microsoft just pull up the secret OpenAI panel and prompt "fix all github bugs, triage out primitive public-level AI slop first"?

the cognitive dissonance between “software engineering is a solved problem” and the state of software everywhere (still pretty crappy, maybe even worse than a couple of years ago) is staggering

This smelt like spin to me when they started putting it out.

1. Microsoft/OpenAI have their incredible world destroying AI surely this should be a non-issue as coding is solved.

2. Are their customers the only ones using AI while gitlab/{competitor} customers are untouched by AI?

This one has been driving me (and many others!) mad for _years_.

"Change default base repository for pull requests on forks" - https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/11729

In the current age of AI, the cost of adding new features is much, much lower than the cost of fixing bugs.

This has always been the case to a certain extent, but the effect has now been amplified to the point that certain complex bugs will likely remain unfixed forever if AI can't fix them easily.

A lot of those bugs are fundamental ones related to the basic architecture unfortunately and can’t be easily fixed because of all the load bearing crap that has been added on top of code written nearly twenty years ago. or so a little birdy told me…

Over the last four years, GitHub announcing a change or new feature has generally led to a worse experience, for me at least.

One excellent update that comes to mind is their updated code search (2023) which can be super helpful and respects a solid grammar.

https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-code-s...

Is this last update one of those worse experiences?

The new issues and PR search, and new listings UI is great improvement. More functionality and more dense UI showing more things.

Improvements to Projects have been really good. Personally, I find no need for external project management tools anymore.

The issues and projects team(s?) have been cooking.

One of the recent features I love the most is that they virtually the same color for symbol highlight and text selection. No visual feedback on double clicking a symbol to see if it is highlighted or not (and it sometimes isn't, because they managed to break that too!). Cannot highlight part of the word that happens to be a symbol either. What a lovely feature. It shows that they are not using the product much anymore.

I’ll just contrast this with the default dashboard experience at my employer’s in-house bug tracker. That dashboard allows the user to customize the view in a grid, such as 1x2 or 2x3 or 3x3. Then within each item of a grid you can define a search query whose results will be displayed there. For each result, you can customize which items to show, e.g. subject, need attention, assignee, priority, etc. The UI feels dated in a late 2000s style, but it permits staggering amount of customization. When different employees open their dashboard it feels like different websites.

Software from before the current era, where we thought giving the users choice was a good thing. Now everyone gets a bland default, and people no longer invest in, or particularly care about, their tools, since some PM that has no idea about your use case will just change it in the next update anyway.

I don't mean to be cynical, but the trend is very real, in my experience.

So it's good? Sounds like it, but not 100% clear.

This has noticeably worse info density compared to https://github.com/notifications, https://github.com/issues and https://github.com/pulls. Those old pages' list entries have padding-top: 8px and padding-bottom: 10px. This new dashboard's list entries have padding: 16px. Just why? It’s definitely more relevant though, overall a positive.

Becuse the designers got bigger monitors and need "space to breath" when presenting the design. It's not like they work much with these empty lists

Yeah, I’m surprised at the negativity here. This is probably one of the few actual improvements github has made to UX in a while, normally when I visit I want to be looking for my things to do, not the social feed (though, I do like to explore the social feed sometimes, so, its not like its totally irrelevant, its just not the reason I go there).

Maybe that was the point, if its not front and center then nobody will use the social features.

Regardless, I think its hard to balance UI for normies and UI for techies, I think theres also a lot of brogrammers who might think they like being techies but their version of tech is lots of padding, whitespace, diffused colouring and not information density and consistency.

Personally, I have a negative almost visceral reaction when my tools change, because I learn my tools intimately and create expectations of where things will be- but this is also why I avoid tools which don’t have consistency in their UI too.

> Yeah, I’m surprised at the negativity here.

I get design/product people sometime that get all caught up in "we need to simplify" or there's not enough whitespace. Every time, the design/product person is not a user of the product, and the result is you ship their improvements, get blistering angry feedback (last time I even got the most prolific user and recommeder of our product calling me on my cell at 11pm) and revert.

> their version of tech is lots of padding, whitespace, diffused colouring and not information density and consistency

Exactly this. I think is speaks more to how frequently the designer uses the product versus actual users, and they don't understand the difference between UX for casual/infrequent users and people who spend all day in the product.

> I’m surprised at the negativity here

I’m not at all. People around here love to hate GitHub, and think any change to a product or design is incredibly regressive. These to combine and people lose their minds.

> Yeah, I’m surprised at the negativity here.

It shouldn't be. The dashboard literally doesn't work. There are features on the dashboard that literally do not work. There are features on the dashboard that lie to you. You cannot trust the dashboard.

It's also not necessarily useful because, while it might put my stuff in front, it's not the stuff I care about. And I don't care about all my stuff all the time. Why should I care about a pull request that I have open on a random repo from January? Why should that be one of the top items that I need to address?

More importantly, why can't I resolve it from here?

Why does the copilot chat not work? It doesn't. You type something in, you hit Enter. It takes you to another page. You leave that page, you go back to the dashboard. The dashboard doesn't work because it's blank, and the copilot chat never got sent. And you lost your prompt. GitHub lost my content. I put content into GitHub, and that content is no longer in GitHub. That is user-destructive behavior. It's horrible.

Let me be clear: I put data into GitHub. I hit submit. It took me to another page, and that data went missing. It's just chat, but it's still chat. It's still something I entered. I hit submit, and it's gone. That's from this new dashboard. That alone should be negativity enough.

I'm not asking GitHub to create me the perfect dashboard. What I am saying is that the dashboard that they provided is fairly useless. So useless that, of the entire dashboard, there are only two small little links in the middle of the top repositories that are remotely useful, and there's no way for me to sit there and manage all this stuff. Even if you filter stuff down, the filter options are so pathetically worthless that I don't know why they bothered. I'm not asking GitHub to create me the perfect dashboard. What I am saying is that the dashboard that they provided is fairly useless. So useless that of the entire dashboard, there's only two small little links in the middle of the top repositories that are remotely useful, and there's no way for me to sit there and manage all this stuff. Even if you filter stuff down, the filter options are so pathetically worthless that I don't know why they bothered.

If the goal of the dashboard was to make it easy for you to do your GitHub work, to get stuff done, then for me, they failed tremendously. I'm a developer. I've been a developer for many decades, and I like what I do. GitHub, for all its faults, has pieces that work really well, but the dashboard is absolutely not one of them. I feel like the dashboard is run by the same people who do the code review stuff, and they don't know what they're doing. They've done the dashboard. They've checked it off. They said, "Now you see your stuff front and center," and it's like, "Yay," but it's not stuff you care about.

So sure. We're not at the bottom of the trash anymore, but we're still in a pile of trash.

Chances are slim that someone from GitHub will read this, but the text in this post (and other posts in the Changelog category) would be much more readable if there was more contrast between the text and the background (now it's dark grey text on black background).

This also depends on the screen you're using. Older LCD screens sometimes don't show colors/contrast that are super clear on newer displays. Not saying your comment is invalid, just something I've noticed.

If only there were accessibility standards and tests checking the contrast for readability. /s

At this point, not using OLED displays is just inviting troubles.

Not my team or area of expertise, but the text (#8B949E) to background (#010409) contrast ratio is 6.7:1 which does conform to WCAG 2.2 AA (>4.5:1). That said, I agree that the contrast isn't the best. I can share the feedback with the team and see what they think.

> We’d love to hear your thoughts on the new dashboard experience. Drop a comment with any questions or feedback in the Community discussion.

Please someone at github, hear this. Discussions are useless for feedback as you cannot subscribe to just the single thread you posted, only the entire discussion. That means I have a a binary choice of drinking the firehose or ignoring all future comments on some feedback I care about.

Please fix this.

There’s an inbox view in github that shows me all the PRs I have to care about. It’s amazing.

Except I discovered that it just doesn’t include things sometimes. Items that show up in the “this month” filter disappear in the “last 3 months” filter for example.

This is one of those things where if it only works 98% of the time, it’s next to useless. I can’t just pretend a few PRs each week don’t exist.

You can save custom filters to that page as well, if helpful.

Ever since I discovered `gh`, I stopped going on the website itself. Stuff like this just makes it even more unlikely I'll return :-D

oh this is amazing. funny that they are self aware enough to talk about reducing context switching

who are 'they'?

the makers of the github CLI ‘gh’ which is github themselves.

Thank you as well. :)

~~Mordor~~ Microsoft!

Thanks for the reply. :)

Since the terminal is having its renaissance right now, I find it really great. VS Code with its integrated bash really shines here, all my developer tooling is right there with [CTRL] + [J] (cargo, pnpm, uv, you name it), all the code and docs live right in the repo with the keyboard friendly explorer and general keyboard friendly UX of VS Code (I touch the mouse like once an hour).

And with the gh cli, I dont even need to visit the overloaded github website anymore for PRs, Issues, Discussions etc, I can read it write in my terminal with pure text, no nonesense in it, clean and minimal, exactly what I need to be productive - and like you said, no context switching.

P.S.: It also feels like I am living in those futuristic 80/90s Cyberpunk Animes and Mangas where everything was a terminal/tui B-)

It’s frustrating how they are doing all these pointless changes (in my opinion) and not implementing IPv6 support. I guess Github is only interested in AI now and making its UI terrible (because in my opinion it has only worsened 2020-onwards).

In the opinion of many, pointless stuff includes IPv6. Current system works for end-users. They get almost no direct benefit from IPv6.

End users are not the only relevant party, this attitude is short sighted.

What's the relevant party that is having a bad experience due to lack of IPv6?

IPv6 support for what?

For me!

What is this website dashboard stuff? For coding? Isn't it just a big distraction and periodic focus stealer? They are assuming you are staring at that page all day?

I use git. Before that clearcase,p4,svn,cvs,even rcs... In all that time never did I need a web dashboard with clippy telling me what to focus on.

Emails were not good enough? Email is certainly more reliable than sh*thub.

The lack of a dashboard used to bother me. I wrote/prompted my own as a standalone Mac app over the past few months that works better for me, at least from a "what pull requests do I need to review right now" standpoint. It was hard to find this on GitHub.

https://github.com/evanhalley/beet

Sidebar topic: (analog or digital) Work Tracking Systems for solo/tiny team sizes.

Central Question: What pragmatic work tracking advice do people have for tiny (1-4; 1 founder, 1-3 contractors) team sizes, analog or digital?

Context: I noticed a source of friction for my larger solo projects (1+ months) was a lack of structure and carrying the entire project in my head. Effective for hackathons but life is starting to force me into more context switching (getting older I guess). I've already refactored my work system to involve an analog weekly planner + weekly retro/plan ritual, heavier emphasis on digital calendar, adopting a two phase work philosophy (planning/grooming, task execution) often facilitated by pomodoro (5 minutes plan, 25 execute), and leaning on having a digital work tracking system.

I've taken a large bet on GitHub's ecosystem. Issues + "type:" labels let me create ticket types (spike, feature, bug) + "area:" labels (e.g. runtimes, category of concern (security, REST, client, ...), ...) allows me to gather and tag appropriate units of work. GitHub projects supports kanban boards and "filter by" or "slice by" features that are helpful. Pull Requests + Actions let me vet software additions. Issue/PR comment streams allow additional context capturing. Milestones & Releases let me plan larger epics and bundle my software. It's a robust digital system whose mental model makes sense in the context of delivering software.

I have an ambitious software project idea (multiplayer game software) that I'll eventually want to bring in a contractor or more. I want to stipulate some degree of interfacing with my system, even if it's just to capture the high level "this feature is handled by contractor A" and allow delegated delivery.

The points of friction so far have come from wrestling decision control with ai agents, and resisting the temptation to plan in too much detail too far into the future.

Given that brain dump, what advice might you have for me to help make for successful?

Everything, including my Dutch textbook website for some reason, is vibecoded now.

It's cheap and price matters more than UX.

Could you be more specific?

when they launched this in beta they asked what they should improve. most of the comments asked for making the agent sections removable. guess what they didn't change.

Funnily enough, the first thing I did when I logged in and saw it this morning was remove the agents nonsense with an AdGuard rule.

Better than the feed. But I still go straight to the left sidebar for repo 90% of the time, and the random ordering + "show more" is incredibly frustrating. Let me set permanent sort and default to show more. The contents of the right sidebar (what's new) do not need to exist at all.

Or just skip all of this BS and let us design our own homepage with pre-defined components.

Every time I land on the dashboard, I am reminded how much I hate it, and how GitHub works REALLY hard to make developers lives difficult.

I agree, I'm sorry but the github home page infuriates me to no end.

I ended up making a userscript to redirect github.com -> github.com/<user>/repos in the end :P

This is a stupid thing to latch on to but why is everything an “experience” now? It’s a fucking programming dashboard, not a three-star Michelin restaurant.

You do experience it when using it. What HN does the most is complaint exactly about the experience.

It's simply the industry term to describe the design of a user interaction with a system's interface. That's like complaining DC technicians refer to "blades" when it's just computers in a rack.

Github has a dashboard?

I tried to use copilot on GitHub once - I asked please check the myrepoxyz and tell me if it is using the latest dependeicies.

It told me he could not do that.

And I think "Why they put this useless button everywhere then?"

Why does Github even bother with a dashboard. All I want is a list of all my repos. Basically my profile page should take the place of the dashboard, or allow me to make my profile my dashboard.

Does anyone use the dashboard?

Just a note: if anyone wants the old-school experience, https://github.com/dashboard-feed works fine for now.

I'm so happy to be working in Forgejo now. Goodbye GitHub.

Github seems to get slower and slower, while Forgejo running on my $5 VPS lets me fly through repos and files instantly.

Do you have CI on that?

Yes, the CI takes a bit of setup but I used a cheap Hetzner server as my runner and the CI is rock solid and reliable.

I also get docker registry hosting.

I built ghradar.dsebastien.net recently because I needed something like that

splitting the feed from issues and prs makes sense, but i don't need starting a coding agent to be the center of my dashboard. glad the old view is still an option.

Thank you. Now revert whatever it is that makes org mode files not render since ~40h.

For a long time, GitHub's dash was my most refreshed "social" homepage. The new experience isn't bad, and the feed is still there, but just broken out. But now that it's not the default, I fear the ship has fully sailed and sunk on GitHub as a social network, sadly. Am I the only one that thinks it's weird that I have to go to LinkedIn and Discord (and sometimes even email) to chat with my collaborators?

x-posted on their feedback:

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/208952#discuss...

Instead or alongside this, how about making notifications good? There's some concrete simple improvements that would help triaging in general.

1. Provide ways to filter notifications of a specific state (merged, shipped release, closed) so these can be handled in bulk easily

2. Filter by type (issue / pr / release)

3. Provide access to the done state as a filter and via the api, so we can use non github website tooling to manage the notifications

4. Filter by author (e.g. let me filter dependabot notifications so I can handle them in one pass)

5. Show and allow filters on PR check status so I can look at PRs that are ready for a quick next step rather than ones that require digging into failures etc.

6. Make this all available properly via the API so I can let my clanker interact with this stuff based on rules that it has to help me triage stuff. Right now there are enough missing fields from the notification APIs that it makes it impossible to work around the shortcomings of the notifications with tooling (without screen scraping /notifications).

All of these things would be better for interacting with work to be done.

A general rule on this is if the information would make it easier to understand what work is to be done, to choose it, to act on it in bulk or in batches of similar actions, then that info belongs in the UI and the API.

---

Also. Please make it possible to subscribe to a discussion comment, but unsubscribe from a discussion. I want to read replies to this comment, but don't care to get a notification on every reply to this entire discussion. Unsubscribing. Tag me if you want me to read a reply here.

GitHub has a dashboard?

It changed?

TIL

Nice to see someone equally dispassionate about Github. It's a place to `git push` to and that hasn't changed in ages!

Would love to know what exactly is different today with this new dashboard, compared to when they first launched it as a preview? What did they already iterate on after getting user feedback? Would seem like the most intuitive parts to share in a blogpost about a feature moving from preview to be a default, but maybe not.

They've made / completely focused on the repos that you own and work on (and added some Copilot stuff I can't see because I don't use it), instead of the social media-like "Feed", which is now on a separate /feed page.

Opting out just makes the Feed appear on / again. I'd rather they just give you the option instead of doing the opt-out-until-we-remove-the-opt-out thing, the coward's way to change a default.

That sounds like what this new dashboard experience is in general, not how it changed between when I first tried it during "preview", and now.

Or are you saying that all those things are new in the "new dashboard", compared to how that was initially when they launched the preview?

Yep and I hate it. I'm in several teams in my org and to find certain repos - the never show up in the sidebar quick search and 1 click - instead it's now Settings -> Teams -> (find team) -> Click on Repos -> (find the repo)

yeah just put copilot as the first item on the home page and call it improved ui

can you smell the slop?

Im sorry but they need to make it more focused on the repos that you own and work on, this is not a social media site now matter how hard they try to drift in that direction.

I'm confused; that's exactly what this change does. The previous home page was like a social media feed, the new one shows your work.

I know it's frowned upon to ask this here, but: did you read the article (or open GitHub) before posting this comment?

GitHub’s UI is dreadful now.

it's still so garbage though.. on a 4K display:

- only half the sidebar is being used, by the "top repositories" section

- i have my own agent and want copilot purged from view completely rather than being the first central item of the dashboard

- why is the changelog taking up 1/4 of the screen? move it to the navbar as a popover

- the content doesn't go full width so i'm losing a column or two worth of content

PRs and issues sections are the least worst parts of the dashboard and they're still worse than just using /notifications as a dashboard.

completely worthless.

What is the point of all these new dashboards and features when Github itself is inaccessible due to outages happening every week in some form or another. At this point their stated uptime is all fake. Their worst 90day uptime has been at 84%

https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/?view=all#about

LLMs are good at building dashboards, they are much less helpful at fixing reliability issues.

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