GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

"I think of GitHub as a collaboration tool."

Well yes but git itself is the tool at the base of the pyramid you call GitHub and co. It seems you actively want git to look like all the other things you are used to and they are all walled gardens.

GitHub takes git and basically turns it back into subversion and co. Instead of all that anarchic "no repo is king" long haired hippie nonsense, you want central control 8) I do too but only within my company, so we use gitea (other git control freak enablement platforms are available).

Why not go back to basics and start with git? Just git. Add a comms channel - it can be telephone, SMS, email, Slack, semaphore or smoke signals. Then add stuff on top of the basics and see what happens.

Quite a large project works like that already. You might have heard of Linux.

Or stick with a canned effort like GitHub (I use it for some things) and accept that you get what you are given if you abrogate your options to someone else.

I don't feel like this article really answers the question of why this is the wrong shape. CI takes too long? What else?

You can make your CI less intensive, that doesn't require a different Github. What features would a 'differently shaped' platform have?

A lot of the choreography in standard GitHub workflows (make a branch and send a pull request and do the integration tests) is about teams with multiple devs working in multiple branches. If you just want to move fast with AI on a greenfield project then commit and push suffices

So the general basic primitives of git — diffs, commit history , content hash addressing are pretty optimal. If you wanted to implement version control in anything—even like a Notes app with undo—you’d eventually end up reinventing the same ideas

GitHub is fine. The thing that’s changed is that we’re unlikely to need large teams anymore. Merging code will be easier and if planned properly (using AI planning skills), the work can be broken up with clear boundaries.

A lot of words, but essentially says nothing useful.

If GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world. Well, show me a hint of what the new world should look like?

To me it seems like everyone is frustrated, mostly at how fast things are changing, but not necessary because the existing tools suddenly became trash/irrelevant.

A lot of us are still contending with the fact that large amount of code is being produced and we don't know what the fuck to do about it. And we're less intimate with the code and product we ship than we were before.

Software engineering hasn't changed. Every aspect of it is the same as 4 years ago. A code monkey churns out poorly designed code and poorly deploys it. Nobody really pays attention and it kinda looks like it works - until it doesn't. The only difference now is the code monkey's name is Claude and everyone can hire him. But every part of the SDLC, every component, every way it's used, are all identical. Same difference as a hammer and a nail gun. The job of a house framer didn't change, it just got faster and slightly easier.

I suspect a fair percentage of AI skeptics would be closer to neutral were there less SaaS-bros declaring all existing systems hopelessly obsolete in the hopes of selling their own ten a penny wares.

This week I created a "clanker" account backed by an LLM agent on GitHub and have been iterating with it on one of my open source projects as if it was just a super fast contributor. And... it has been fine.

I was expecting it to be awkward or annoying but it just kind of worked. I write issues, I tell the clanker to look at the issues, it generates PRs, I review the PRs and test them.

I was expecting something to really be a snag this week but I have enjoyed the process and using the tools. And the advantage of using the clanker is I go from issue to PR in a few minutes and don't "page out" my own context of the problem which is not the case usually with an open source contribution.

I still feel like software needs to move at least at the pace of someone with a vision and taste to test and review which forges like GitHub seems fine at.

This is a good article. I've been working on infrastructure to facilitate safe vibe coding with a focus on data synchronisation with simple access control and analytics. See https://saasufy.com/

I think this article makes some great points though I'm not sure if GitHub itself is the limiting factor. My view is that the new abstractions are yet to be discovered or widely adopted but I'm seeing some clear patterns arise. This is something I spend a lot of time thinking about because the new abstractions must fit within existing paradigms to provide a smooth transition and to overcome trust barriers.

I think I still have some work on the packaging side. Will likely need to narrow down my focus to cater to this new deep tech trend I see coming. I'm kind of waiting for some influencer to invent the right terminology for what I've been working towards so that I can jump on that bandwagon.

Deep tech trends need to permeate into the business lingo before they can get any traction and to do that, the new abstraction has to prove itself in some influential circles and earn itself a new label/buzzword.