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Discussion (20 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
If everyone is vibecoding, and SaaS plays have no moats anymore, and everyone says they are mad at Github's reliability...why aren't there like 10 viable replacements already?
Why are you still using Github?
- And yes, GitHub is a massive product with like 50 different huge features. No reasonable person would say you can trivially vibecode that. Vibecoding would still make it easier. I feel this argument is a bit silly, no? "Ah, you can't vibecode GitHub in a weekend? That proves vibecoding was a mirage!" Surely even the most fervent anti-AI skeptic must admit there must be some middle ground between "a mirage" and "can literally replace millions of man-hours of work".
Open-source projects, yes I can sort of get it, you want to be where the contributors are (but there are downsides to that also).
I have yet to see literally anyone say this.
I have yet to even see anyone claim that software can't constitute a moat anymore but I expect that there are people saying that. GitHub has a huge non-software moat in the form of network effects, brand recognition, and good will.
The hardest part isn't making a "forge", it's making money off of making a forge. Getting a sufficiently large number of paying customers.
If GitHub doesn't get their quality issues under control someone probably will manage to breach that moat and take over the market. It's not like there's a lack of competitors (Pre-llm: GitLab, BitBucket, Gitea, Source Hut, etc. Post LLM: Tangled, esrc is promising something any day now. Probably more in both camps that don't come to mind).
I've heard a lot of people say this...including myself after a root beers. I think you just have to look to any time an AI feature is announced and some related companies stock price crumbles. Just google something like "stock price tumbles after anthropic announces" or something like that.
Because everyone wants the fake internet points (sorry, stars) to mention on their CV.
Because there are already a number of viable alternatives, them not being chosen has nothing to do with AI coding but other factors like market momentum & network effects and familiarity. They are used, just much less so. If there are already good alternatives, why would anyone vibe code a new one any more than they would write a new one manually? Forges are not sexy stuff, and the existence of numerous decent free ones means that you aren't going to be able to sell a new one in any way (paid accounts, stalking/advertising, …) at least not until it has a significant following and that is unlikely to happen because of the reasons above.
People not wanting to use github (or one of the common alternatives that already exist) are more likely to just use git as-is, and other tolls as needed for issue tracking, CI, etc, than to create a new forge.
I'm using GitHub for my open source projects as:
1. While GitHub Actions has its issues and doesn't work for everyone, I've found it easy to build and test an IntelliJ plugin against multiple IntelliJ versions.
2. I don't have to pay for and manage the hosting of the git repository.
I still have a GitHub account I actively use.
GitHub outages and stuff don’t really affect me, so I have no great reason to leave. But I have good reason to stay, because that’s where everyone else is already.
Show me the VCs who are willing to fund the marketing effort that would be needed to conquer the network-effects moat, and I'm in.
https://youtu.be/f3u57jkwBFE?si=FJuxZfmc-i7EkPlx
Github is struggling because of compute, which comes from everyone vibecoding and triggering actions 10x more.
I can vibecode an alternative, but once i have users, who is going to secure this amount of compute? Compute+talent to manage it(devops isnt vibecoded *yet) is a moat
So I’m working on waza.sh. I have NO intent on making it commercial, nor open-source (unless someone wants to collab on it).
Will it need compute? Yes! For my team only. So a dedicated box at OVH/Hetzner for 30eu is more than sufficient.
Stars. Grifters have discovered vibe-coding and the ability to buy GitHub stars, followers, etc.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=buy+GitHub+stars&ia=web
[1] https://liberapay.com/forgejo
[2] https://donate.codeberg.org/
[3] https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sourcehut/
Unless you're suggesting driving demand to zero...
Can't even do three 8s properly.
Imagine you run 365 services, and each goes down 1 day a year.
If those are all on the same day, this would report you having 99.7% uptime.
If instead, each service goes down 1 day per year but on different days, this would report you having 0% uptime.
Despite the same actual downtime for any given service.
The truth is somewhere in the middle, that github has run degraded for a significant amount of time.
But I don't think it is fair to take an incident like this one[1], where 5% of requests were incorrectly denied authorisation, and count it the same as you would the whole of github being down.
[1] https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/02z04m335tvv
IT seems to be quoting incident reports for the duration of each outage, so there is accountability in terms of being able to verify all the details of what they are counting.
> and why it's sooo different from gh's official status numbers?
Maybe this is counting any period with any service showing any level of issue as a complete fail, and the official numbers are cherry-picking a bit (only counting core services? not counting significant performance issues that the other count does because things were working, just v…e…r…y … s…l…o…w…l…y) or averaging values (so 75% services running at a given time looks ¼ as bad in their figures), the two sets of calculations could be done with a different granularity, …
In other words: lies, damned lies, and statistics!
The only way to know is to know how both are calculated in detail, and that information might not be readily available.
2. Github is doing some classic big org sneaky things where they don't count degraded service fully. So if github actions is partially down for most people in a away that makes you say "github is down", there's a good chance that microsoft doesn't count that or counts it partially instead.
Even worse example is the Travis CI. For more than a year their CI jobs sometimes get stuck or do not start for days, and, surprise-surprise, it's never shown at their status page[1] - always green. We would switch to something else entirely if not the unique offering of PowerPC and SystemZ servers/runners. Apart from that - it's the worst CI service I used so far.
[1] https://www.traviscistatus.com/history
For my personal work I did a hard cutover to GitLab last month. The issues import is the most complex part as the default import messes up issue authors.
We should probably take a break on these. It's probably more newsworthy now when GitHub is "up".