by brushfoot
28 subcomments
- The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride:
> [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1]
> [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [2]
> [2025-11-28T09:21:12Z] it’s abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it [3]
---
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127021007/https://ziglang.o...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127140447/https://ziglang.o...
3: https://web.archive.org/web/20251128092112/https://ziglang.o...
by mkornaukhov
17 subcomments
- IMHO, the main advantage of github is that it is an ecosystem. This is a well-thought-out Swiss knife: a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system, convenient issues, as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners. In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser. You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly. Having a sponsorship system is also great, you don't have to search for external donation platforms and post weird links in your profile/repository.
All in one, that's why developers like it so much. The obsession with AI makes me nervous, but the advantages still outweigh, as for me, the average developer. For now.
by mittermayr
4 subcomments
- Additional note on Codeberg, which I think is great as a project, but I got curious on what infrastructure they are running on and how reliable this would be for larger corporate repos.
Nov 22, 2025
https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-u...
Quotes from their website:
Infrastructure status
[...] We are running on 3 servers, one Gigabyte and 2 Dell servers (R730 and R740).
Here's their current hardware:
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/meta/src/branch...
[...] Although aged, the performance (and even energy efficiency) is often not much worse than with new hardware that we could afford. In the interest of saving embodied carbon emissions from hardware manufacturing, we believe that used hardware is the more sustainable path.
[...] We are investigating how broken Apple laptops could be repurposed into CI runners. After all, automated CI usage doesn't depend on the same factors that human beings depend on when using a computer (functioning screen, speakers, keyboard, battery, etc.). If you own a broken M1/M2 device or know someone who does, and believe that it is not worth a conventional repair, we would be happy to receive your hardware donation and give it a try!
[...] While it usually holds up nicely, we see sudden drop in performance every few days. It can usually be "fixed" with a simple restart of Forgejo to clear the backlog of queries.
Gives both early-Google as well as hackerspace vibes, which can or can not be a good thing.
- Let me be blunt: this looks like a tantrum. Bugs exist, and they're sometimes fixed more slowly than we'd like, but given the size of the GitHub ecosystem this is probably just one of many outstanding bugs. Blaming AI is baseless - not that it couldn't be true, but the conclusion seems to be drawn from a single issue.
What does this mean for the Zig project? I haven't heard of Codeberg, they may be great, but for a popular open-source project I'd expect a proper discussion before deciding to move or weighing the pros and cons of different hosting options. From what I'm hearing, Zig is technically excellent but seems to lack level‑headed, mature leadership. That's not unique: many open‑source projects started by brilliant engineers struggle as they grow and need a new leadership structure. That transition can be painful and could even harm adoption.
- I have sympathy for some of the GitHub complaints. otoh just went to try to signup for Codeberg and it's down ... 95% uptime over the last 2 weeks?
https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg
by keiferski
2 subcomments
- LLMs are useful, but AI is itself a marketing term that has begun to lose its luster. It’s rapidly becoming an annoying or trendy label, not a cutting edge one.
I guarantee that in ~24 months, most AI features will still remain in some form or another on most apps, but the marketing language of AI-first will have evaporated entirely.
- They also made the disastrous update to the dashboard feed which made the frontpage pretty much useless.
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65343
- One thing that's really nice about codeberg is how fast the pages load. Browsing GitHub often feels very sluggish. Obviously there's a difference in scale there, but I hope codeberg can keep being fast.
- I think once Codeberg becomes federated, it will likely attract a lot of people.
Right now github is great for discovering and tracking projects, reflecting growth via the star and fork system (although a bit broken in the last few years).
If a federated layer is applied to these github alternatives, you could have an account in Codeberg, and be able to track lots of projects wherever people want to host them. Right now, I see a lot of forgejo servers, but I don't want to register in all of them.
by liampulles
0 subcomment
- The main function of GitHub is really just advertising or at least broadcasting your work. I would use GitHub issues, stars, etc as an (imperfect gauge) of the quality of a library. This is not because of GitHub's features, just that it's the biggest and most well known. And yes I know buying stars is a thing, which is why it's part of the evaluation and not the whole ballgame.
Now that zig is fairly well known and trusted, it makes sense that this is less of a concern for them when migrating away.
by QuadrupleA
3 subcomments
- Probably a good time to mention fossil, an excellent SCM from the makers of SQLite with a number of github-like features built-in:
https://fossil-scm.org/
Single ~6mb executable, blazing fast. I've been a happy user for years.
by tacker2000
3 subcomments
- To be fair this has more to do with Github Actions than Github, which from the beginning was never really going to rival any professional solution.
The people at Zig should use proper CI tools and not something that a big service provider is offering as an afterthought.
- Google workspace will have me do the same. No, I don't want to 'generate an image' I just want to use my own, thank you. They give their AI prime billing everywhere to the detriment of the products and the users.
by shevy-java
2 subcomments
- The reason is a bit strange. To me it seems as if Zig is
just very opinionated. Personally I think the decision to
move to Codeberg was made independently of Microsoft being
a problem. I don't dispute that Microsoft is a problem; I
just don't see many great alternatives to github either.
Gitlab consistently is worse for me as a user.
I think the bigger problem is that these big megacorporations
control so much. I find Google even more problematic than
Microsoft these days in that regard. AI worsens this problem,
but even without AI it already was a problem.
- Well, diversity is great but I think many people underestimate the quality and service of GitHub, especially the free services. Even commercial vendors have failed to provide such a free service over time (Docker Hub, Bintray, Sourceforge). They all have/had the power to earn money though commercial offerings and ads, but in the end had to cut down their free services. I still wonder, how codeberg plans to cover the exploding costs.
- We are seeing the realtime result of MS buying Github and buying influence. Put this into context with what happened to twitter when it was bought. I stopped hosting my code on GH, even in private repositories years ago. It is a privacy nightmare to think about LLMs ingesting this information. I believe this is a positive development for Zig to steer away from being entangled with whatever MS is pulling on Github next. It's like avoiding a landmine when you move away from something that is starting to go on a revenue driven tangent relative to its core use case. If you put the claims that Zig needs a big project or stay niche aside, a lot of things Zig brings to the table make working with memory and systems much easier for those who can't get into rust (like me). Just install it and play around with it to see for yourself. I wish we'd go back to being more exploratory instead of focusing so much on economics and careers where corporations can influence what is the right thing to do.
by thewisenerd
1 subcomments
- previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46064571
Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg - 883 comments
- "Either you have to embrace the AI, or you get out of your career," Dohmke. Dohmke left CEO position of GitHub in November.
- I totally agree, Microsoft is ruining everything with AI, like all Microsoft product have been on decline for years even before the LLM era, and now they are on an even steeper decline.
it makes me sad to see that github is now going through the same shit, and people are using other random half-ass alternatives, it’s not easy to keep track of your favourite open-source projects across many source forgeries. we need someone to buy github from Microsoft and remove all the crap they have added to it.
- Seeing the decline of GitHub in Actions is technically correct, but Actions was always broken. We tried getting self-hosted runners to work super early before there was a proper ephemeral mode (just an officially unsupported race-condition-y --once flag). It sucked. That code can't produce a consistent status code, constantly failed to connect to its scheduler with obscure Azure error codes and had so many races with accepting and timing out jobs. Runners wouldn't get new jobs, jobs would sit there for an hour and then time out, runners would just die and need to be re-provisioned (we used ephemeral VMs in a GCP instance group). This is all because Actions is actually Azure DevOps Pipelines rebranded.
Compared to then this product is downright mature now. And also, there always were people at GitHub who delivered crappy products outside the core that most people working on FOSS got to see. Enterprise Cloud has a ton of sharp edges and things that make you ask "WHY" out loud. Notifications with SAML enabled are broken in countless ways (I have 0 out of 12 notifications right now), newly onboarded users are encouraged to click a "request copilot" button that sends emails to admins you can't disable, policy toggles that used to do one thing get split up and not defaulted properly. The last two in particular are just dark pattern hacks to get people to use Copilot. In an enterprise product.
I haven't used GHES, but I imagine it's worse.
- Is anything broken on the pure Git side of Github? From this, it's clear that actions and runners are becoming unusable. But are repositories still safe?
by zerofor_conduct
1 subcomments
- I feel that training copilot on Github repos without maintainer consent was a betrayal - this pushed many projects over to Gitlab.
by coopykins
3 subcomments
- Maybe this is a nice chance to ask, would you move from Gitlab to Github? I would say no, but some people in my org are proposing it, it seems to me simply because the integration it has with AI tools, but my experience has been worse in Github than with Gitlab.
- Maintain on codeberg, mirror to GH. Tell everyone to contribute on CB
done.
- This resonates with me. Last week I got stuck on a bug where GitHub actions was pulling ARMv7 docker images when I specifically requested ARMv8. Absolutely impossible to reproduce locally either.
by mechazawa
8 subcomments
- More and more projects are moving to Codeberg, and I'm wondering; at what point will a critical mass be reached? Or will we end up with a fragmented ecosystem?
by aperture147
3 subcomments
- I don't get it, why did they allow GitHub bot to modify and merge pull request automatically? Yeah I agree that MS is ruining everything with AI, but this problem is avoidable, if they turn off the bot's auto merge feature, or turn it off completely. The reason they move to a lesser known Git provider sounds more like a marketing stunt.
- You are a big name --> don't need GH for followers and contributors.
You are a small potato --> GH gives way more followers than contributors.
CI/CD is not good on GH either.
At this point the problem is discovery. With a federated search engine the actual forge host would not be an issue anymore.
- Move 'ZIG'.
For great justice.
- GitHub is slow bloatware at this point. I can get a PR to load at least 2-3x faster in Graphite than GitHub. I avoid going directly to their UI at all costs now.
by 7222aafdcf68cfe
0 subcomment
- A lot of these forced "AI" integrations are essentially Clippy on steroids.
A more careful approach focusing on use cases the technology can really support would be much preferred.
- Am I in the minority when I actually like those AI features on GitHub? The ability to interrogate any open source codebase is __amazing__, this feature alone has saved me days of work/research. The AI code reviews are nothing to write home about, but occasionally catch stuff that I would've missed, a net benefit for me. I don't really get all the outrage... Sure, having an "Ask AI" Clippy-like thing in your face everywhere gets old quick, but at least on GitHub I find it non-obtrusive and often actually useful.
- github actions is pretty terrible.
the self hosted runner host is some horrific dotnet csharp mono monstrosity and "language" is some javascript wrapper nonsense that needlessly creates a half baked dsl around running basic shell commands.
it has a pretty ui, but that's about it.
by mittermayr
1 subcomments
- I hate these constant drama posts, but I am all for seeing competition. I think it's good to have a couple of top-tier companies offering the same service, and especially with git, it's been... lacklustre outside of Github, I'd say. Bitbucket was totally nice, but Atlassian and Jira and meh... Github has (mostly) steered clear of cross-product promotions until the CoPilot era washed all over us, and I wonder for how long they can continue to thrive off the power of brand-awareness.
Same effect at play watching all the top-tier AI corps under heavy competitive fire still, trying hard to keep the audience attached while battling to stay on top of (or keep up with) the competition. This mainly (for now) benefits the user. If OpenAI were to trailblaze on their own, we'd all be paying through the roof for even the most basic GPT by now.
by jackfranklyn
0 subcomment
- The interesting thing about Zig's move isn't really the drama - it's watching a project work through platform migration in real time.
Most open source projects talk about reducing GitHub dependency but never actually do it because the switching costs are brutal. Issues, PRs, CI integrations, contributor muscle memory - it all adds up. Codeberg is solid but the network effects aren't there yet.
Curious whether this pushes other projects to at least have contingency plans. The AI training concerns are real, but I suspect the bigger long-term risk is just platform enshittification in general - feature bloat, performance degradation, mandatory upsells.
by phplovesong
0 subcomment
- And now a huge Zig user is purchased by an AI company. The tale as old as time.
- Yep, all my new stuff is on Gitlab.
by jillesvangurp
2 subcomments
- Zig is distributed under the MIT License. MS is completely with in their rights to clone the git repository from Codeberg and do whatever with the source code. Including feeding it to their AI algorithms. Moving it to Codeberg doesn't really fix that. I get that some people want to restrict what people can do with source code (including using it for capitalist purposes or indeed ai/machine learning). But the whole point of many open source licenses (and especially the MIT license) is actually the opposite: allowing people to do whatever they want with the source code.
The Zig attitude towards AI usage is a bit odd in my view. I don't think it's that widely shared. But good for them if they feel strongly about that.
I'm kind of intrigued by Codeberg. I had never heard of it until a few days ago and it seems like that's happening in Berlin where I live. I don't think I would want to use it for commercial projects but it looks fine for open source things. Though I do have questions about the funding model. Running all this on donations seems like it could have some issues long term for more serious projects. Moving OSS communities around can be kind of disruptive. And it probably rules out commercial usage.
This whole Github is evil anti-capitalist stance is IMHO a bit out of place. I'm fine with diversity and having more players in the market though; that's a good thing. But many of the replacements are also for profit companies; which is probably why many people are a bit disillusioned with e.g. Gitlab. Codeberg seems structured to be more resilient against that.
Otherwise, Github remains good value and I'm getting a lot of value out of for profit AI companies providing me with stuff that was clearly trained on the body of work stored inside of it. I'm even paying for that. I think it's cool that this is now possible.
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- [dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46064571
- Lack of investment more like. There are a ton of simple and obvious bugs that have persisted well before the AI crazy, e.g. this annoying bug from 2021: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/6874
This one is almost a one-line change (technically they need an extra flag in the YAML but that's hardly difficult): https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/12882#discussi...
That said, I still think Github is fine, and you can't argue with free CI - especially on Windows/Mac. If they ever stop that I'll definitely consider Codeberg. Or if Codeberg gets support for stacked PRs (i.e. dependencies between PRs), then I'm there! So frustrating that Github doesn't support such an obvious workflow.
- The article is very hard to read, with ads on one side, links in every other sentence. I could not even figure out where Zig has gone... TLDR anyone?
Edit: Scrolling comments I see something called Codeberg but why am I getting connection refused?
Another edit: Oh because Codeberg is down. I had to look at another thread on the frontpage to find that out...
by sleepybrett
0 subcomment
- I heard tell that everyone at github is now tasked with either AI or getting github running fully on azure.
- Look, how is number to go up without constant AI bullshit? Won't somebody think of the shareholders!
MS in particular _really_ seems to be sacrificing itself on the altar of Roko's Basilisk; they appear totally incapable of doing _anything_ that isn't AI-branded anymore.
- In other news today, Bun, which is one of the biggest projects written in Zig, joined Anthropic, the company behind Claude Code, and has nothing but kind words to say about AI. If Zig becomes ever more hostile to AI, I wonder if there may be some "friction" there.
- See also people switching from windows to Linux.
MS need a stint of focusing on what users want rather than ramming stuff down their throat unasked hoping they’ll swallow
- maybe I’m out of the loop, but what is the “obsession” with AI that’s ruining it? GitHub still works for me like it always has. How are other people using GitHub?
by samdoesnothing
0 subcomment
- Wait I thought they left because Github software engineers are "monkeys".
by honkostani
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by beanjuiceII
1 subcomments
- niche language does something, cool story
by johnjames87
0 subcomment
- Haven't noticed any AI problems or annoyances on GH.
by NitpickLawyer
3 subcomments
- Last week the reason for the move was MS tools being used by the baddies. Today AI is the baddie du jour. To use a great quote "either do or don't, but I got places to be".
- I like AI changes. Can change files from UI, will fill commit message for me. That's awesome.
by venturecruelty
0 subcomment
- I'm loving all the seething comments because a smart man who runs a good project is doing something a bunch of stealth GitHub employees don't like, even though it doesn't affect them. You don't have to use Zig, y'all. You don't have to agree with Andrew's opinions, y'all.
- Pretty immature to be honest. I won't stop taking the bus because I don't agree with its drivers political views.
- Why does ever HN thread read like a churlish blogger review of the latest installment of <popular-scifi-franchise>?
Github is great. It barely changes at all and yet it's still too much for this originalist crowd.
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