alt Hacker NewsPeople want to dunk on GitHub, but honestly going from 50M of <thing> per day to 2B <thing> per day will break pretty much any system anyone has ever built here. Even if it was over the span of ~8 months, many things will fall over and then as you patch those the next domino will fall.
I feel bad for the team, but will be great growth opportunities for all.
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2 billion per day is 23,148 per second on average. Perhaps peak bursts are >100K per second. That's a seriously insane number to keep up with at GitHub's scale. I've worked on systems that write >100K things per second and when it has to be globally distributed and relatively consistent within seconds, that's a very tough challenge.
There has to be some economic incentive in place if their scaling issues impact the entire platform. If their system can't handle it then they need a toll system for these agents until the scaling is in place.
The problem with that argument is that GitHub was unreliable before vibe coding
I don't recall this being an issue for Facebook, YouTube, Google, Instagram... All of which have had much better up-time than GitHub, without the excuses. I don't even like those services or companies, but I have to give the engineering teams props for being professional.
I like GitHub (maybe liked?), but their up-time isn't acceptable and I don't get the "poor little Microsoft/8B acquisition" story either.
When your business model is to provide valuable thing for free to corner out competition out of business, don’t be surprised that your service gets to be used asymmetrically.
Yes but MS are driving that growth so they should really have done some impact analysis.
But shouldn't super human AI be able to fix all the bugs for free and make the service infinitely scalable? That's what I was told at least
no need to feel bad for the company encouraging slop and breaking the oss ecosystem
Why not separate systems between paying customers and free tier vibecode slopsters?
Allowing that growth was a policy decision, and a bad one at that. They could have acted differently and they deserve all the complaints for not doing so.
When it became apparent that this growth was on the trajectory, instead of doing something to limit it and thus preserving the reliability of the platform, GitHub (or maybe Microsoft) decided to embrace that growth and allow their own platform to fail. They didn’t need to do that. And they shouldn’t have done that. They deserve all the criticisms coming at them for doing this.
> going from 50M of <thing> per day to 2B <thing> per day will break pretty much any system anyone has ever built here
This is likely a pricing failure. Systems breaking due to over-usage is like going to the store and finding that they're sold out. You're much less likely to sell out if you charge more. Meanwhile, GitHub not only didn't raise prices, they cut them at the beginning of the year: https://github.com/resources/insights/2026-pricing-changes-f...
And this is beside them cutting the Pro tier from $7/seat/month to $4/seat/month back in 2020 and not touching the price since: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/learning-about-github...
Bear in mind as well that the Pro tier includes 3,000 minutes/month and the Enterprise tier ($21/seat/month, and no published minimum seat floors) includes 50,000 minutes/month. $21/50,000 minutes/month for a solopreneur is practically giving away the farm.
GitHub needs to drastically increase pricing, at least for Actions; their current pricing is practically a WTO dumping violation.