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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Growing frustration with GitHub’s reliability and product direction is driving some open-source maintainers and companies to leave the platform, with recent high-profile projects migrating to alternatives like GitLab, Forgejo, and Codeberg. Commenters link the decline to Microsoft’s post-acquisition priorities, including aggressive AI feature rollouts, Copilot monetization, and a perceived shift from stability to growth at all costs. Others note the powerful network effects that still keep most code on GitHub, but argue that self‑hosting and decentralized forges are becoming increasingly attractive for teams that depend on high availability and predictable workflows.

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.