> The increased ‘agentic’ load on github is the direct result of their own actions and those of their parent company, Microsoft, and that makes reliability problems their own fault.
Microsoft & Github are not a monolith. it's an institution with dozens of divisions and 100k+ employees all vying for revenue.
Anyone who's worked at a big company knows what it's like to be given an unfunded mandate to serve an important business strategy.
The author moans about the 3 copilot button's on github. meanwhile github has to manage (a) providing loads of free hosting and (b) keeping the servers up.
The entitlement to moan about a free app not providing enough free hosting, and bemoan the engineers who are barely keeping it running.
Author here. I am not a free GitHub customer. The only times I use GitHub are when my consulting clients do, who are by and large GitHub enterprise customers. It is not entitlement to complain about a company that you pay money for a service failing to provide that service by the terms of their own service lifetime agreement, something I point out repeatedly.
That is helpful context, thank you for now sharing. So it sounds like you’re not a paying customer, and that your report & experiments were completed from a free customer account, right? If that’s not the case, it would be helpful context to add to your report. How can someone only use GitHub on behalf of their clients? Perhaps you mean it in the narrow sense of “I don’t have any private GitHub repos myself”, rather than “I never git clone from GitHub”?
The same way that an employee might only use GitHub on behalf of their employer. It's not mysterious or complicated. If my client brings me in to help on a software project that's already hosted on GitHub, that's what I have to use. So I use GitHub pretty much every workday, because I want to get paid. This is part of the problem: GitHub remains the default despite the fact that it is no good. Hence me writing the article, to try and change that.
Before I went independent I used GitHub for a bunch of different employers, so I've watched it's decline over the last decade from the front row.
My clients are the ones paying for GitHub enterprise, in this case. Depending on the context I'll either use my personal account or an account under their organization, etc. Usually I don't have admin permissions (rightfully!), sometimes I do.
I have used pretty much every corner of GitHub in pretty much every possible context for well over a decade. I'm sure you could find something I haven't touched, but you'd have to think pretty hard. I thought that would be obvious from the fact I talked about things like SLAs and GitHub actions, but I guess I should have been clearer.
Microsoft & Github are not a monolith. it's an institution with dozens of divisions and 100k+ employees all vying for revenue.
Anyone who's worked at a big company knows what it's like to be given an unfunded mandate to serve an important business strategy.
The author moans about the 3 copilot button's on github. meanwhile github has to manage (a) providing loads of free hosting and (b) keeping the servers up.
The entitlement to moan about a free app not providing enough free hosting, and bemoan the engineers who are barely keeping it running.