HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
71% Positive
Analyzed from 1416 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#github#code#why#git#every#pay#things#don#kind#lot
Discussion (13 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
You can make your CI less intensive, that doesn't require a different Github. What features would a 'differently shaped' platform have?
It's going to keep growing way past how it is now. I often drive 4-8 agents at a time, many in the cloud or on different machines, and use github as a kind of send-off point or starting point literally every single time. In a couple months I hope to be doing that with 10-20 and if it were cheaper I'd go even further, because why not? But even now I'm spending $0.25-$5 every single time I send out an agent to do a sizable thing and obviously they are positioned to capture some of that, because nobody else just lets me pay them $5/mo for git and basic hosting that Just Works (when it's up) and gets out of my way.
So why do they not want me or anybody else to pay them to create delegated/short-lived identities, or at least make their auth token story better so that if there is a way to set that up properly, people use that instead of Co-written by Claude Opus 5 (using my personal credentials because I'm not going to add 2 minutes of login/2FA to every single remote agent pushing its output when it finishes and my other options are even more annoying)?
Also why do they not have some kind of Mythos-like code reviewer specialist model that I can pay to do defensive cybersecurity reviews without being a F100 company? Or just a cheap and good / smart and fast specialist to review my agents' or my own work for problems. Why have they not even talked about doing that? I'm not going to pay some chatgpt wrapper company run by 26 year olds to do that, I want to pay the company that I already pay for that kind of stuff, that has the most data in the world to do it.
And why can't I gig out work on github either? Do you know how many developers there are on the periphery that want that kind of work and spend their time on reddit/discord/github trying to break into the industry? If I could chuck $5 at some task for a guy in another country trying to break into software to do, without all the overhead and sketchiness it involves now, why wouldn't I do that? That's literally the same thing that people do with LLMs.
Why does github codespaces not have some SKU/version for colleges to offer students as learning environments or companies interviewing developers to use for dev environments?
Github actions are not interesting to me because I can just ask my computer to create a cloud vm and test stuff in there, and it does, and I don't have to configure YAML or learn some specific way to do it. That's like the opposite kind of product github should focus on, it's almost a market for lemons because who tf would overpay enough for github actions for Microsoft to actually make money off of them when you can just switch to Azure/GCP/AWS/anything and pay a guy to run vms when your developers push things, if your usage is enough for the profit to matter. Github actually has unique/best-in-the-world assets and opportunities to do a bunch of products and services with higher margins because of how deeply the global software ecosystem/developer community depends on them. Let me pay $1/mo/delegate identity and $100/mo on bounties and $10/pop on interviews.
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
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.
1) you start acting like a senior staff level engineer and you stop caring so much about implementation and start caring about the things that actually matter, the architecture, the performance profile, the scalability, the test coverage, the monitoring, the velocity of development, etc etc.
Or 2) you don't scale.
LLMs can write 10k lines of code per day like its nothing. You can't review that with a jade handled magnifying glass and keep all that in your mind. After a few months, you could easily have 250k lines of dense production code + much more in tests and tooling etc.
You either have a team of people to watch over that, or you don't. You're not scaling yourself to be able to review all that and keep it all in your mind.
If other people are scaling, and you're not, you're unlikely to do as well as them. BUT, it's not impossible if you're really good. Being really good scales way less than using LLMs effectively.
Google doesn't work because they rely on hope that every person they hire doesn't do things they shouldn't. It works because they make it nearly impossible to do things you shouldn't. You need to build systems as well. Or you don't. Just do it the old way.
Pick your poison.
This is essentially the state of all blog posts now. As well as much code. Lots of content, not a lot of value.
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.
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.
Then can you clarify what it's actually saying, concretely?