GitHub 'No Longer a Place For Serious Work', Says Hashicorp Co-Founder

Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub's frequent outages have made it "no longer a place for serious work," prompting him to move his Ghostty terminal emulator project elsewhere after 18 years on the platform. The Register reports: "I've been angry about it. I've hurt people's feelings. I've been lashing out. Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is irrationally personal," he wrote. The reason for his ire is the service has become unreliable. "For the past month I've kept a journal where I put an 'X' next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work," he wrote. "Almost every day has an 'X'. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage."

Hashimoto penned his post a few days before an April 28 incident that saw pull requests fail to complete due to an Elasticsearch SNAFU. Incidents like that mean Hashimoto has decided GitHub "is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day." "It's not a fun place for me to be anymore," he lamented. "I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software."

The developer says he wants GitHub to improve, but "I also want to code. And I can't code with GitHub anymore. I'm sorry. After 18 years, I've got to go." He's open to a return if GitHub can deliver "real results and improvements, not words and promises." But for now, he's working to move Ghostty to another collaborative code locker. "We have a plan but I'm also very much still in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS)," Hashimoto wrote. "It'll take us time to remove all of our dependencies on GitHub and we have a plan in place to do it as incrementally as possible."

He's doing the equivalent of leaving a toothbrush at a former partner's house by leaving a read-only mirror of Ghostty on GitHub, and by keeping his personal projects on the Microsoft-owned service. But Hashimoto's moving his day job somewhere new. "Ghostty is where I, our maintainers, and our open source community are most impacted so that is the focus of this change. We'll see where it goes after that," he concluded.

1M monkeys with 1M unplugged Selectrexes

[Pseudonymous Powers]

Rest assured, the slope-browed, devolved remnants of Microsoft's software engineering team is hooting "ayyyy-jent-ick!" into their laptop screens as frequently and loudly as they can.

Re:

[jhoegl]

Microslop continues to show its investors why it shouldnt be worth money, but for some reason, investors continue to poor money into the pit.

Re:

[Sebby]

for some reason, investors continue to poor money into the pit.

Do you think they care about the dramatics?

... Or even the semantics of 'poor' vs 'pour'?

Nope

[kwerle]

Huh. What's Ghostly?
* Click link -> https://ghostty.org/ [ghostty.org]
* Clcik docs -> https://ghostty.org/docs [ghostty.org]
* Top right corner [ GitHub -> ] -> https://github.com/ghostty-org... [github.com]

Nope.

Re: Nope

[DeanonymizedCoward]

Not sure what Ghostly is, but according to the first link there:

Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.

Re:

[algaeman]

It's a terminal emulator. That is an app for people that want to do serious work.

Re:

[Sebby]

Nope.

I said that at "Hashicorp".

When Microsoft buys something....

[Arrogant-Bastard]

...it's time to bail. The same for Oracle or Salesforce and for some others. As soon as the acquisition is announced, it's time to make a plan to move to something else somewhere else. These companies have an absolute talent for destroying everything they touch, and they can do it surprisingly quickly.

This is very difficult for some people; I understand. I had a hard time letting go of Sun after having been a customer since before they had customers. But it's necessary, because any/all attempts to stay the course are inevitably doomed. It's better to rip the bandaid off as soon as possible, drink a toast to what was, and leave it behind.

Moved to a local Gitea

[courteaudotbiz]

Plenty of features, easy to install and use, easy on resources, open source, and independent from Microslop.

What more can you ask for?

I used to have all my repos on Github. Now they're all in my Gitea.

Yet another Microsoft purchase success story

[devlp0]

I still miss Skype ...

GitHub has been terrible for years

[Murdoch5]

I'm honestly sitting here trying to think of a time when I could say GitHub was a decently good, and usable product, and I can't. GitHub is a case study with how to screw up a simple and powerful tool like Git. All the added tooling, features, AI nonsense, bloat, and commercialization, at the hands of a company, Microsoft, who have failed in specular fashion to produce usable anything, in years, what do you expect?

Git does not need the bloat, it's a simple and powerful tool you run on the command line, w

it's git

[caseih]

While I understand his frustration, this is git. Your repo is always local so you can always work with it without relying on a central service. In fact there are ways to run GitHub actions locally. And it can pull and merge from your local command line. I get the convenience of GitHub. But if you're choosing to be dependent on GitHub for everything, then I can't really blame Microsoft for your inability to do work.

Instability

[rel4x]

Am I the only one noticing a huge escalation in the number of seemingly rookie mistakes at large companies that are leaning into AI the hardest? The internet has seemed a lot more feeble lately. I encounter pretty large bugs on a regular basis, downtime seems to be going up across multiple respectable services. I do try to not pin a convenient narrative on a series of anecdotes but it is definitely standing out to me.

Anyone had any doubt?

[HnT]

Anyone had any doubt that this is EXACTLY what would happen once micro$oft got its claws into GitHub?
That is what they have been doing since at least the 90s.

No serious programmer every used it

[TheWho79]

No serious programmer would EVER put proprietary software in the cloud. Open src is one thing - proprietary is another. Don't think so? Ask Google - https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

Re:

[cruff]

But this is exactly what many corporations are doing. Had to use it at $previous_day_job.

What's the problem?

[Waffle Iron]

With all of GitHub's great new AI features, it writes all your code for you! It doesn't matter whether the site is up at any given moment; just download your newly completed app at some point then the site is online. You're free to kick back, relax and scroll your social feeds because you don't actually have to do anything anymore. This is truly a golden era!