HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Perceived decline in GitHub reliability

  • Many report noticeable degradation in stability, especially over the last 1–2 years.
  • Frequent partial outages affect PRs, issues, Actions, API, and sometimes even git pushes.
  • Third‑party uptime trackers show low effective availability; some note GitHub’s own status reporting underplays issues.
  • Users complain that incidents cluster around common working hours, making them highly disruptive.

Causes debated: Microsoft, AI, and scaling

  • Some blame the post‑acquisition “feature rush,” AI/Copilot focus, and migration to Azure over core reliability.
  • Others attribute issues to massive growth and “AI slop” traffic: huge numbers of low‑value repos and higher PR/Actions load.
  • There’s disagreement whether this is a hard scaling problem or a failure of well‑known operational practices.
  • A minority frame it as part of a broader pattern of large acquirers degrading products for financial/strategic reasons.

Impact on workflows

  • For teams using GitHub Actions or relying on PR reviews and issues, outages can halt CI/CD, releases, and collaboration.
  • Some note that writing code locally still works; others counter that modern workflows depend on the surrounding tooling, not just git.

Why people stay

  • Strong network effects: almost every developer has a GitHub account; it’s the default place for FOSS and a hiring signal.
  • Familiar UI, low friction to onboard contributors, and integrated features (Actions, Copilot, packages).
  • Migrating a deeply integrated system is expensive and often delivers no obvious business value.

Alternatives and migration experiences

  • Self‑hosted GitLab, Forgejo, Gitea, and SourceHut are common destinations; some report better stability and faster CI, others hit admin overhead and bugs.
  • Several notable projects have moved to Codeberg/Forgejo or other forges; a repo was created to track such moves.
  • Opinions diverge on self‑hosting: some see it as essential control and reliability; others see it as costly, non‑differentiating ops work.

Views on GitLab and other forges

  • GitLab is seen by some as more capable and better for CI; others criticize its growing heaviness, UI churn, and SaaS bugs.
  • Emerging decentralized forges (Forgejo+ForgeFed, Tangled, Radicle, Fossil) are discussed as ways to reduce centralization, but are still niche.