The corporate branding, the new “AI-powered developer platform” slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as “GitHub”—the traditional website, what are to me the core features—simply isn’t Microsoft’s priority at this point in time. I know many talented people at GitHub who care, but the company’s priorities just don’t seem to value what I value about the service. This isn’t an anti-AI statement so much as a recognition that the tool I still need to use every day is past its prime. Copilot isn’t navigating the website for me, replacing my need to the website as it exists today. I’ve had tools hit this phase of decline and turn it around, but I’m not optimistic. It’s still plenty usable now, and probably will be for some years to come, but I’ll want to know what other options I have now rather than when things get worse than this.
↫ Misty De Meo
Apparently, GitHub is in the middle of a long, drawn-out process where it’s rewriting its frontend using React. De Meo was trying to use a particular feature of GitHub – the blame view, which also works through the command line but is apparently much harder to parse there – and realised the browser search feature just couldn’t find the line of code they absolutely knew for sure was there. After scrolling for a while, the browser search feature suddenly found the line of code.
I’d heard rumblings that GitHub’s in the middle of shipping a frontend rewrite in React, and I realized this must be it. The problem wasn’t that the line I wanted wasn’t on the page—it’s that the whole document wasn’t being rendered at once, so my browser’s builtin search bar just couldn’t find it. On a hunch, I tried disabling JavaScript entirely in the browser, and suddenly it started working again. GitHub is able to send a fully server-side rendered version of the page, which actually works like it should, but doesn’t do so unless JavaScript is completely unavailable.
↫ Misty De Meo
Seem like a classic case of people being told to develop something in too little time, with the wrong tools, while management is breathing down their necks and pulling engineers away to work on buzzwords like “AI”.
As far as I m concerned, the downward trajectory of GH has been going on for quite a while. Even before the AI craze, I did not need or use at least 3/4 of the features, and felt that with every new feature introduction the GUI got more complicated.
But then, it’s hard for commercial products to keep up with the Joneses without falling into the featuritis trap…
GIT in itself is backwards for me. SVN is better in every way FOR ME. do not get you panties in a bunch and start screaming at me.
Github as a site i have no comment on, since i have never used it.
Do you mind me asking if YOU work on a development team? If it is JUST YOU, it would make sense that Git offers fewer advantages along with greater complexity. Distributed version control was created to address problems that arise when the people authoring new versions are, well, distributed.
While not the original commenter that you replied to, i do tend to mostly agree with him. I find that Git is hugely overhyped and over complicated for many teams. I think if the merge algorithm in SVN had worked nearly as well as the one in Git, especially with something as simple as whitespace differences, then probably Git would never have been as big as it is.
If you are heavily into branching, then sure, Git is better for you. If you think pull requests is a good part of your workflow, then Git is for you. If you need to support multiple versions of a product, then Git with something like Git Flow is probably a good fit.
If you are doing single version deployments of software or services in an agile fashion using CICD with mostly trunk based development, then Git just feels overly complicated with more ways to get in your way than help you.
Now, i don’t actually write code myself other than as hobby these days, but if i decide to switch back to being a contributor, it will for sure be on a team that work in ways where they don’t need Git – Even though they will probably use it because everyone just picks it by default.
The part i hate the most about Git, other than people using pull requests for code reviews, is that it is way too easy to make a big mess of the history if the individual developer is not careful.