So much for GitHub...

Well, they did it again. GitHub is no longer an independent entity; it’s now controlled entirely by Microsoft’s “CoreAI” division, the depressing excuse for an overmarketed replacement of their developer team. Apparently, in fact, they’ve been doing it for quite a while already; I just didn’t fully notice until they fully pulled the rug.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

And what an unfortunate direction it’s going in now.

GitHub’s slogan was, for a while, until relatively recently, “Where the world builds software.” And they were (and are) right – they are, and have been for quite a while. And they earned it, fair and square – until recently, I will grant, they had the best product. In some ways (and from a pure consumer value standpoint, not considering ethics) they still do, and are still improving, which makes this ever more unfortunate; I myself have happily taken advantage of the Web IDE and Codespaces when I haven’t had a powerful computer, or just haven’t wanted to bother setting up a local environment.

And this isn’t just inside their product itself; the student pack, for instance, has let me explore and learn things that would’ve been far outside of my reach otherwise.

But the shine is wearing off. Sure, if I only look at money: GitHub’s free, while SourceHut costs me a subscription.1 But I can trust SourceHut (and, of course, my own Forgejo server behind an Anubis proxy) to not use my code to (possibly illegally, and certainly immorally) train proprietary LLMs like GitHub.

I won’t delve too deeply into my thoughts around the usage of LLMs for programming in this post (that’s for another one), but I will say this: the premise is as hallucinated as the code,2 and the entire industry is essentially a recursive marketing scheme.

And I have no interest in having my code hosted on a platform that is now entirely controlled by the MICROS~1 spicy autocomplete division, and thus entirely focused on convincing customers that they enjoy their autocomplete hallucinated.

At this point – especially after this latest move – I’m afraid I don’t trust GitHub as far as I could throw one of their datacenters. And I don’t think that’s very far.

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be on SourceHut or Forgejo.3

  1. I know that it doesn’t have to, but I like the CI, and I’d like to support them regardless. If you use SourceHut, I recommend you take a look at the paid plans too; the CI alone is worth it. I was not paid to say this, to be clear. ↩

  2. Reading this article certainly made me feel vindicated; I always doubted the articles, blogs, and press releases talking about AI boosting productivity. I’ve tried coding models a couple of times, and I’ve always spent much more time fixing AI-generated code than I would spend writing the code myself, and enjoyed it much less. I once spent half an hour trying to convince an early Claude model to write a “Hello World” GTK+ program, and eventually gave up. ↩

  3. I still have my GitHub account, and I’ll still use it for contributing to other projects (it’s somewhat of a requirement in the current state of open source), but my new projects will be, as much as I can manage, elsewhere. ↩