idan

That there's a question in your mind about what can "rehabilitate" this is troubling, but sure:

An event centered on what men want, costing thousands of dollars a ticket, with paid female talent there to "help" them is skating around the definition of prostitution in the same way that Kalshi skates around the defintion of gambling.

I'm sure Epstein and his buddies justified their rape and abuse by throwing bags of money at the girls too. If that's not enough to make you call bullshit on the entire enterprise, that's on you.

I don't believe in regulating how people have fun. But when you create an environment where it's hard to tell the difference between fun and coercion, throw money and power into the mix, claim it's not about trading money for sex but everyone paid money and there's quite a bit of sex happening, pretend that it's about some high minded principle like "helping people to relate better"? Please.

This is how Epstein happens

Nobody should be tolerating this, let alone celebrating or venerating this. It's a misogynistic sex cult with a thin veneer of science. Incels but with fancier words. Repulsive to the core.

Hello! Idan (from Next) here, and others from the team will drop by the thread if you have questions!

This post misses the point about what has changed. It's not that coding is or was easy, it's that coding is _more than typing code_.

Typing is easy. Coding is hard. LLMs eliminate the typing and aid with all the other parts of writing code (where is the system that I want to mutate, how does it work today, debate the tradeoffs inherent in the potential plans of action).

What remains after factoring out the typing and the time spent assembling an understanding of code is opportunity cost. That's not an insult any more than memory managers are an insult to languages like C.

was not expecting a HN crossover with /r/formula1 today, but here we are

I do work at GitHub. I shared the above as a nuanced "yes and" to the pain that Mitchell is feeling.

In the same way that Mastodon didn't replace Twitter even when Twitter went to shit, I don't believe in the various GitHub alternatives becoming a broadly-used thing. Maybe we'll end up with more GitHub-alikes like Codeberg, mabye we'll end up with some communities adopting novel forges like Tangled and Forgejo. But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated. Has the same energy as "20XX is finally the year of linux on the desktop".

My very personal hot take: the likeliest happy future is _most likely_ to happen through improving GitHub. I vote with my feet to do that from inside, and that's all I wanted to add. Hence "I hope we do the things that make you want to come back one day." I believe in it enough that I choose to work here on exactly that, because like Mitchell, I care very much about the platonic ideal of GitHub. He's ready to move on, and I'm not yet. There's no value judgment hiding inside that.

Correct, sorry I thought this was pretty obvious but in retrospect maybe not.

I'm not encouraging Mitchell to stay, I'm saying that my version of his post is about _me_ staying to make a brighter future, and adding my context on why I still believe that.

And finally I closed with "I hope we win you back" to be extra clear about it!

Shrug

Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion. There's nothing magical about git remotes. Just add some more, figure out a process that works for you, have fun!

In reality: when I want to send a letter I don't want to figure out a process from scratch. I want to go to the local post office, buy a stamp, and post a letter.

Convenience is a spectrum and different people land in different spots. What irks me is when I lack the choice. And that's not the case here.

shrug, I can't fix a lot of things in our reality, but I'd love to leave software development in a better state than when I found it

derp, haven't touched that in a while. TY!

Salesforce never understood Heroku. Salesforce's understanding of Heroku, if such an understanding ever existed, was wildly different than what Heroku understood it wanted to be. Benioff's penchant for buying himself a company every year did not help — "no headcount this year, we're buying Mulesoft/Quip/Tableau/Slack/$WHATEVER. And oops we spent too much money on dreamforce. Sucks that your pager rotations are burning people out!" It was very clear they did not give a shit about us, as evidenced by resources.

It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them.

What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be. A home for all developers, playing a central role in the production of both public and private software. That alignment was never there with Heroku/Salesforce.

GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster. Much much much faster. And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up. GitHub in 2026 fundamentally resembles a pre-PMF startup in many ways because of that. I'm obviously not an unbiased observer, but I wouldn't count us out just because it's an uphill. Everyone's on that same uphill.

Having experienced both firsthand, I fundamentally disagree that there's a parallel. GitHub/MSFT has the median amount of corporate bullshit. Not more, not less.

Caveat, I'm not a lawyer, I don't speak for the company, yadda yadda

It's a product that is _de facto_ present in nearly all developer scenarios. There are scenarios where I personally believe public management is better than private management, e.g. single-payer healthcare is strictly better than the bullshit we have in the US now. It's fundamentally cheaper for the polity when the government negotiates with healthcare providers than each private insurer.

I don't think that's fundamentally the problem facing GitHub, and I don't think it would be better in any way — for anyone — if it were regulated like a utility. But again, I write javascript for a living. Take what I'm saying with a big-ass rock of salt.

Hi there! Longtime fan and hubber here.

It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there's ~180m GH accounts nowadays)

My version of your post reads differently:

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

Walking away would be easy. I felt that way when I left Heroku ~six years ago. I left that job and never opened the Heroku dashboard again, after nearly a decade of happy use. I felt that it was irredeemable, and though it took a while, Salesforce did eventually succeed in running it fully into the ground.

I don't feel the same about GitHub. It is precisely because it's precious that I can't walk away. I'm not the only one here who feels that way.

In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. But none of it feels like the Heroku/Salesforce debacle. Occam's razor applies here: it's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale, and a fundamental shift of the ground under all of our feet.

I hope we do the things that will make you want to come back. I hope we spark that joy in you again! It's not stupid to have big feelings about something that is so central to our lives as developers. Fuck that noise.