Will Github Survive AI? with Sam Lambert

Okay, so listening to a very special episode of Members of Technical Staff. What Sam doesn't actually know is that I say that for every episode.

Yeah, I know you do.

I've completely diminished the meaning of it. So I'll have to find some other sort of synonym or some shit for that.

Yeah, superlative.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. But everything is special, right? I mean, that's the thing. I mean, like, San Francisco's back. I mean, so I have heard.

Yeah.

Everything is happening. People are coding with like 16 agents. People are moving here and paying $5,000 a month for a 1-bedroom apartment to work on their AI powered B2B SaaS startup.

That's a cheap apartment.

Oh, it's cheap now.

My first apartment was ridiculously expensive. I moved here in 2015, so it's just all back again. It's not—

That's right.

It's no worse than I remember it.

You know, I was— so yeah, so when I moved, so I was 2017, and for the apartment, which sort of doubled as our college dorms, it was on Mission and 9th.

Yep.

And I was splitting a, uh, I believe it was like a 200-square-foot studio apartment with somebody else.

Yeah.

And I was paying $1,500.

Yeah, see? Yeah, that's wild. I couldn't believe, yeah, you had to show up, you used to have to, probably still the same now, you used to have to show up with like a pre-filled credit report, which I obviously didn't have any credit because I just moved here. Of course, of course. Yeah, I mean, that was wild. I mean, still apparently it's like that again.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you know, like the bidding wars and it's just like people submitting like 12 months of rent just to—

Yeah, that used to happen too.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow. Yeah, I am that old now that I can say, yeah, I remember back when. This happened previously.

I've been here long enough. I think I feel like 2019 was especially— it was like that year before COVID It was like everything was like—

It got better again though because of COVID They finished all the projects and everyone left. So there was loads of housing inventory showed up and now it's all gone again.

Exactly.

Wonderful.

Exactly. It's this beautiful circular thing. Like is— like is, is that the way to put it? Basically the way that GitHub is going at the moment, right? Beautiful circular. It's up and it's down, and it's up and it's down. And so I figured what better person to bring on than somebody who was a part of the great organization in which we are a minor part. A minor part. He's you know I'm here to glaze. I can do the glazing. That's totally fine. But you know but it's it's one of those things in which there's been ample commentary about it on X dot com the other day.

A lot. Yeah.

And so therefore you know why not bring someone who is technical onto members of technical staff to talk about how GitHub affects all of us, right?

Massively.

Massively. Massively. So, I guess, like, where I probably would start is, what's happening to GitHub? Like, what's that sort of like the high level? I mean, you know, we can touch on the downtime, right? We can talk uptime or however you want to think of it now.

Uptime. Yeah, you can call it that. I mean, it's going down every day, right? Like, it's under extreme load. which is tough, and getting a lot of commentary. Like, this always used to be the same. Like, back in the day, we would get people very unhappy when we went down.

Yep.

It seemed like, well, we had our scaling era. Like, we had this time where we would go down a lot and it would really piss people off. It was nothing like this though.

Right.

This collision of, like, agent load and, you know, just factors, I guess, with Microsoft Purchasing the company a while back.

Yeah, yeah.

I was really—

That's right, because you actually tweeted about the Microsoft purchase. Gosh, I don't actually have it in my notes, but it was something along the lines of like, you know, an acquisition that Microsoft hasn't fucked up or something along those lines.

We all kidded ourselves that this would be the one they wouldn't fuck up.

That was it. That was it.

Here we are. Let's hope for the next one. We can hope for the next one. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, it's just sad. It's sad to see it in this state and just having And people just constantly talking about leaving GitHub is very sad.

Right, right.

Absolutely, absolutely. It's hard to watch. I mean, I talk to a lot of people that used to be at GitHub. Seeing that angry unicorn creates a very different response for all of us than it does— I know it's annoying for everyone to see it, but for people that lived on the pager for that product—

Right, right.

It's like the fail whale. Yeah, just seeing it is still a terrible stress response for everybody, and thinking what could be the problem. Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs, really, unfortunately. Totally. Totally. And hopefully things— I believe they will stabilize things. They have to.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think people are just unhappy generally.

Yeah.

I think, you know, it's a product that's really hard to build because the audience is just so technical and cares so much about it.

Yes.

And just kind of loved it. Like, I remember I used to run into people. So I joined in 2013. I was there, I think I was employee 120 or something like that.

Nice.

So not super early. But early enough to see a certain era for the company. People back then, even in 2013, would walk up to you and say, oh, I pay for GitHub even though I don't really need it. I just kind of want you guys to do well. And people also would tell me it was the first thing they paid for online or the first work space they paid for.

I was going to say, because the 2010s were kind of like that, right? It's like a lot of free software.

A lot of free software.

People not necessarily willing to pay for stuff.

Correct. It was new for everybody and people didn't love the model we had, which was like if you wanted private repos, you had to pay.

Yes.

But people just fell in love with the product. It was just like very pure. A lot of tech then was like selling ads or doing whatever, right?

Totally, yeah.

And yeah, I think it hits us all when we see something that we sort of grew up on struggling and just changing so rapidly under a giant company.

Absolutely. Like, do you think now it's— I mean, and I've seen commentary on this, But do you think in order to save GitHub, there might actually have to be some sort of pay-per-commit model that has to come in in order to counteract all of the human bot—

I just think it's not going to work. I don't think anyone is going to pay for anything that feels like a tax on being productive with AI. You want people to go nuts? I think either someone comes up with a convincing alternative to GitHub, which I just can't imagine happening, or we're just going to have to knuckle through this one, just hope that they correct or fix.

Yeah, because what was the first? What was before Git? It was like SourceForge, right?

SourceForge. There was— was Google Code around before? I can't remember if it was before.

Yeah, this is well behind my time.

They shut it down though, and we met with them after they did. They truly ceded it to us. The announcement post actually was very nice, like GitHub One, basically. Microsoft even had one as well. There's been so many, but there's never been one prevailing one. It probably was SourceForge, but that was back in with SVN, GitHub and Git kind of went along.

Bitbucket was before GitHub as well, right?

Yeah, all around the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mercurial, Bitbucket.

Yep.

Is that even still around? Maybe it is.

Bitbucket?

Yeah.

I think so. I think so.

I feel like— Australian Git hosting.

I feel like when I started coding, so that would have been 2019, 2020.

Yep.

I mean, basically all I can say to that end is I've seen the name.

Yeah, right. And there's GitLab now as well, but no one's going to use that.

And actually, that was actually going to be one of my questions, was like, how is GitLab not making any sort of inroads here without having to, you know, you don't have to like, you don't have to commit drive-bys. I'm not sure they can.

It's very big in enterprises. I don't know it's going to have the community.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's going to be weird. I mean, shifting communities is really hard, just moving them from one place to the other.

Yeah.

Also, there's just, I don't know, there was never that much of a social network to it though. That's one thing that I saw takes about that this morning. No data supported it, ever really having a social part. People actually didn't want it. Every time it was floated that we would connect maintainers with their audience more, the maintainers did not want that.

Yeah, well, I mean, so many of the great maintainers are anonymous.

Yeah, also, that's very true. They just don't want to be hassled. So that never really worked. I don't know, maybe either GitHub turns it around, or maybe the future's more bleak, which it just doesn't become important. There's other products that are there that are doing a lot more, like Pierre are doing code hosting, which is going to support a whole new wave of these products where everyone's doing it. You need it as part of— Lovable Cursor, all these are doing it as part of their workflow. So that's going to dissipate some work away from GitHub.

I hate to be an absolute shill, but Xo Computer works with me, angel investor.

Yes.

I've got to plug and do all the financial disclosures.

Shout out Zoho Computer.

So there's the same sort of deal, right? I mean, it is really, really just kind of like they do personal automations, all those sorts of things, almost like an open cloud.

And they host it themselves.

Yes. Yes. So there's that. And so I have a stake in this game, and not necessarily against GitHub, because I still push code to GitHub when it works. That is where a lot of it, you know, and again, this is members of technical staff. So naturally, I have a whole host of tweets that we can actually look at.

Oh, great.

You know what? I've completely even forgotten what I did. So I'm going to be reacting in real time to it.

Okay.

Oh, there's Mitchell, the ghostly.

So, yeah.

So Ghosty leaving GitHub.

Pretty staunch stance. Completely understood it. Just very sad to see.

Yes. And so this was— so for those listening, this reads, says, Ghosty is leaving GitHub. I'm GitHub user 1299. Joined February 2008. I visited GitHub almost every single day for over 18 years. It's never been a question for me where I put my projects, always GitHub. I'm super sad to say this, but it's time to go. And this was 2.8 million views and 16,000 likes.

Wow.

And I was trying to actually see, like, I was trying to see if he had picked a particular alternative that he's posted on the timeline. I mean, I didn't research that one.

I think he's gonna announce that soon.

Yeah.

That's what he said.

I figured as much.

It's a shame to lose Mitchell. He's a legend in open source.

Yes.

And a very earnest, undramatic person. So it's very— I'm sure that got some attention.

Totally, totally.

Internally.

Of course, there's a lot, you know, from the chief influencers, we might call them, you know, from Theo. GitHub has been down for most of the day. I'm so tired of this never been so ready to move on. Obviously, Primogen had a similar thing. Obviously, like, in Primogen style, from April 2nd, it was foretold, but it is now reality. GitHub has achieved 2 nines of reliability. So this was when the uptime ticked down below 90%, 89.91% uptime. That's a thing. And then, of course, I— okay, this one was pretty funny. This one was pretty funny, I must say. This is from VeganBot. He said, I told my girlfriend I can't hang out right now. GitHub is up, so I have to work. Don't know when I'll get this chance again.

Bless. She probably won't have to wait long. You'll be back.

Yeah. Did you meet VeganBot at React Miami? He works with Prime. You probably would have been in that house.

Oh, yeah, I did, actually. I did, yes, actually, absolutely did. I hadn't connected them two online, though.

Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So funny.

Yeah, he's pretty good. He's pretty good. I really liked his— he had this whole tirade with the whole GStack posts.

Yeah, the GStack.

We don't have to go there. Gary Tan is a friend of the show. I've spoken about it a bit.

Growth of GStack partly responsible for GitHub being down as well.

So it's funny you say that because I was talking to you earlier about this particular repo. And so this is from Josh from Sentry. He created a repo called Codemaxxed. So this was from not too long ago, so April 17th. He was like, with my Codemaxxed project surpassing 353 million lines of code— Not a typo. Not a typo. I actually got a GitHub cease and desist. We've noticed that this repository is growing fast while committing very frequently. This looks like some sort of automated activity that serves no purpose. And if we look at the repo, so this came about with Gary Tan's whole lines of code thing. So it is gone. He did actually—

Oh, he's just generating slop, burning tokens, using a lot of water.

So it was just out here trying to see how many lines of slop we can get to as quickly as possible. Built with code maxing, a CLI, it's all purpose-built to generate the maximum possible lines of code and commits in minimum time.

Meta staff loved that one, I'm sure. Having to gamify that.

And it was like, yeah, the pitch, one command, 1 million lines, zero value delivered.

Yeah, I can tell what happened on the inside with that one. We used to have— people used to do some nuts things back in our day. Nothing like this, but we'd get some absolutely terribly behaving projects that we would have to send similar notes to that would just use Git in horrifically bad ways. I can imagine in the world of AI, it's just like, Unreal how much traffic is getting hit, if they're getting hit with random stuff like this.

Yes, yes.

Impressive amount of lines of code though.

350 million.

I'm taking this seriously as Anthropic, bro.

Yeah, it's like, yeah, 350 million lines. I think that was in just a couple of days. I mean, if you have like, I mean, kind of makes sense if you have a CLI tool, auto commands committing all day long. But, you know, that was in response to Gary Tan's whole, you know, 67,000 lines of code.

How many lines of code is in Gary Tan's repo now?

You know what, let's go ahead and check this out. Let's go ahead and check this out.

I'm gonna show you on the actual—

If I just, I mean, gstack, that's pretty good SEO, actually.

I did look at the size of his blog's lines of code, and it was like half the size of our full Rails app, which powers PlanetScale.

So there was a whole thread picking it apart. And I think what it managed to find, and it's pretty easy to find when you simply just open DevTools, and it was like, I think it was like 6 megs, 6 megabytes was being shipped to the user. And so he had like, it was clear that they were trying to do image optimization.

Sure.

The agent was trying to do image optimization using a library like Sharp or something like that. And of course, if anybody knows how image optimization works, generally with a library like that is, You will, in your code base or in your repository, you'll have all of the different size images, right? And then you'll use a library like Sharp to basically pick the right one.

And it was picking the largest one every time.

It was picking all of them.

Oh, it delivered every single version.

Yeah, it was shipping every single one. So you had like these—

Edge.

Wow. Yeah, it was shipping all of them. And so you just had these raw PNGs being shipped to the user.

Hey, you know, still probably not the worst thing anyone pushed to GitHub.

You know what, and I was, and I was saying this, um, I forget exactly who I— I think, I think I was like, I forget exactly when I was talking about this, um, but basically all I said, it really is a miracle of like the modern web how that was still usable.

Yeah, right, of, yeah, internet. Yeah, yeah, bandwidth.

Exactly, exactly.

I mean, optimistic spin on it, that's for sure.

Yeah, yeah, it's like, you know what, like Like, I have good Wi-Fi, I could access this totally fine, and things would show up and all those things, even though I'm being shipped 6 megabytes.

I haven't even been on the website. I should look into this. The whole GStack thing kind of went past me.

Yeah, yeah. I am, you know, it's like, it's pretty good. I mean, it's a very, very popular thing. It's a very, very popular thing. And, you know, like the whole idea of like agent skills, all those sorts of things. I've not really gone down that rabbit hole.

We've done our own of those.

Yeah.

No, it's very useful. It is actually very useful. We have a whole set of ours for building internally.

Totally, totally.

Makes people happy.

But you know, exactly, exactly. Well, if it isn't the podcaster that forgot to do a bunch of his ad reads again because the interview with Sam talking about GitHub's woes was just too good to interrupt. So, L, fucking loser podcaster doesn't do his job, doesn't satisfy his contracts. It's unfortunate, it's unfortunate. We'll get to it in a little bit, but I just wanted to respond to a couple of allegations. No, it's not the gay allegations, unfortunately. Can't necessarily respond onto that just yet. But you might have remembered, those loyal MOTS listeners, I spoke a little bit about my body fat percentage a few episodes ago. Now, people tended to not believe me. So what have we done here? We've gone out and got a DEXA scan. What does it say? What does it say? If I can actually just get this up here, those listening are probably having a beautiful ASMR experience. What does that say there? 9.2%. 9.2% body fat. So there you fucking go. I don't really know what it means. I've never had a DEXA scan in my life. I just kind of estimated that I'd be sub-10%, I'm glad I didn't lie. Anyway, on to who pays me. So basically, Capu.ai, your agentic IDE. Of course, you can connect it to your Slack and get non-technical to actually push code to your repos. Sounds fucking terrifying. Who else? Superpower.com. Of course, you might be wondering how I'm able to achieve a sub-10% body fat and the kind of lean mass. Well, that's by going to the gym. But I'll tell you what also helps with the gym: Superpower.com, because it is your one-stop shop for preventative health. And of course, you can actually get the care that billionaires get for less than $200 a year. Track all of your biomarkers. I got my testosterone checked, all of these sorts of things that I find useful as a gym bro for a fraction of the cost to just going to say like a LabCorp or something like that. Most people generally don't know what to test either with those sorts of things. Last but not least, of course, blackbox.ai. Nearly got 2 fucking minutes of me just yapping at you. WPodcaster. Basically, blackbox.ai, of course, your one-stop shop for coding agents, coding agents, right? So go ahead and use Claude, Codex, the Blackbox agent. You can use all of these agents in one place. You can spin them up in parallel. You can use the IDE, you can use the CLI, you can use the VS Code extension. Blackbox has all of these and is trusted by over 30 million developers worldwide. I guess the last thing, and so this was kind of like, this was kind of I sort of asked the question about whether GitHub would move to sort of like a pay-per-commit, pay-per-push view. I mean, Amjad said, if I bring up Amjad's tweet from April 28th, so just a few days ago. So Amjad said, it's honestly impressive that GitHub kept the servers up at all, given this kind of growth. I predicted this years ago. Free services will become untenable with the advent of human-level bots. Worth exploring micropayments. Even cents per Git push might be enough to reduce spam and make this sustainable. Maybe powered by Bitcoin to keep this open and accessible as opposed to KYCing users. Any thoughts on this particular theory?

I mean, it would gate and stop spam. That is for sure. I think it would just upset people very much. Of course.

Well, I mean, we kind of touched on the open source developers, right? I mean, that want to stay anonymous. I think what people don't actually realize about the open source community is that there are truly people there that are just in it for the love of it.

They have to be. We used to get the Chinese government trying to find out who was behind many different repos continually at GitHub. So, they attacked us for 2 weeks over a repo that was designed to get around the firewall.

No way.

Yeah, they would— and the Russian government. Yeah, there's loads of code on GitHub that people were desperate to find out who's behind it or even just pushed it up. Yeah, it was— there's been constant— I mean, there's just always forever been challenges with hosting just code. We used to get in all— we got trouble because of Gamergate once. Someone put like a satirical— that was scary. They actually got into the office, I think.

Really?

Yeah, it's wild what goes on over— or just randomly people would host illegal websites on GitHub Pages. So we'd quite, you know, a few times I'd be called into a meeting that like Interpol would show up at the office.

Yep.

Because that's where they'd looked up where IPs were registered or whatever.

Right.

It was just constant. I mean, it's the same thing whenever you put something popular online, you're gonna get all of this kind of abuse. But now it must just be unbelievable. And then obviously we'd get people checking in, just like trying to check in videos and ridiculous things into GitHub and just use it as like a free archive.

Yes.

Yes. Yeah, he's right. It would work. It would just be—

Yeah. I mean, to me it seems like innovation. I mean, I see a lot of software innovation just coming from open source. I mean, like OpenClaw is open source.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

And it's like OpenClaw. I mean, if there is anything that I've been thinking about, not that I code much at all nowadays, but if there's anything that I'm thinking about when it comes to, I don't know, writing small angel checks or stuff like this, OpenClaw, it completely changed how I think about the way that software is moving. Because before OpenClaw, I was looking at a lot of these computer use products, and I was just thinking, look, yeah, it's cool. I can see where it's going.

Yeah.

But I'm like, it's not there yet. It's not there for me to use it yet. I don't want to go ahead and put the time in to set it up. I can use my time better elsewhere. And then OpenClaw comes along, and suddenly all of these computer use projects are just instantly viable.

Yeah, correct. And it showed what people want.

Yes.

Even though people were very critical of it, they shouldn't have been. It just showed what people really dug into something they want. And obviously, it's spawned a ton of other companies that are going to do it in a more polished way. I ran it and now I just use Poke.

Yeah.

Yep. Because it gives me the same experience, basically.

That's right.

And I can tunnel. They have a tunnel thing, so you can have it tunnel and run stuff on a Mac Mini or whatever, which I do.

Yes.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, it was very illustrative of what people expected. It's what people wanted when AI showed up, right? They wanted this really smart assistant and it just gave people that. I do worry for open source in general, though, in the world of AI. I think people are going to lose— individuals like Peter's very unique, right? He'd already sold his company. This was a hobby for him. I think people that are open sourcing software to then back it by a commercial company are going to really question in the future.

Right. And this has sort of been— I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but we've seen this trend for a little, like even well pre-OpenClaw, right? I mean, I even think of Bun, right? Something like Bun runtime being VC-backed and just being acquired by Anthropic.

Yeah, it was a great outcome for them, but now it's just hard, especially with the copying that's possible now with AI. I think open source was struggling anyway. It truly is, like just the incentives, money, how few people maintain such critical— that's why they did GitHub Sponsors because it addresses that. issue. But now the sad thing is, is people who've spent decades like tending to really good open source projects are now just having their work just disregarded or just copied completely and vended elsewhere.

Yeah.

Or companies that just have a ton of money to spend on tokens can just like— it's lowered the barrier. Like you used to, if you open source something big and complex, it's still so much skill in running it or understanding how it works or being part of the team that wrote it. AI has made that much less of a problem for people that want to copy.

Totally, totally. And then, but then something, you know, like an open source project that holds up half the internet like Linux, right? You know, I mean, those guys are essentially employed by Meta, right?

Yeah, Meta, all the large companies, like there's sponsorship there. Yeah, yeah, that like libssl was the one that they used with the GitHub sponsors. Like it had one guy maintaining it and it's just like critical to the function of the internet.

Yes.

Yeah. And then now all this, like, people are just sending random, like, pull requests full of junk.

Oh, it's a maintainer nightmare.

Correct. I think that's annoying people on GitHub as much as the down— it's like, it's a swirl of, like, culturally GitHub is in this odd place because of AI. And then with it going down and having issues, that's, like, exacerbating things.

Totally.

It's rough.

Totally. I think the thing to wrap on, I mean, you actually made a post. If I bring it up, I'll be able to tell you how long ago this was. It's actually only just a few days ago. April 30th. You were talking about, you mentioned, if the community wants to save contemporary GitHub, we should rally around K. Daigle.

Yes, Mr. Kyle.

Kyle Daigle. And so becoming independent CEO, he has been there since the old days, knows the soul of the product, and knows how to do it. Are you able to expand a little bit on why that might actually be the case?

I think he's been there since 2012 or 2013, built big parts of the product, stayed there for probably one of the longest tenure people. Almost certainly is one of the longest tenure people there. It was a weird company. It was a really strange time, really strange product. Lots of intangibles, like with every company, like with every company that makes something great, there's always these odd intangible pieces to the culture that are really important. And over the years, that kind of has really dissipated. He remembers it. I know he does. And he's lived inside the Microsoft machine long enough, and clearly he's doing really well. His communication is the only reason we know why GitHub was having these issues.

Right.

He went out on a limb and did it and spoke to the community. I think if he could do that full-time and that was part of his thing to do it, he could. But now GitHub is layered so deep inside of Microsoft. Of course.

It becomes a bureaucracy problem.

Massively. I mean, Microsoft is an amazing company.

Yes.

Huge. There's many revenue lines there that are way bigger and way more important to them than GitHub. I don't know, it feels like GitHub should be treated like they'd bought Wikipedia or something. You know, like it's a bit more— there's something a bit more special to it. And like, clearly, it's like the backlash has not been good for them. And I think, I just believe he could turn it around. I've known him for a very, very long time. We worked together very closely back in the day. He could do it. There's just not many people left there that would be able to.

Totally, totally.

I'd love to see it, maybe.

I think we all would, even my ass that barely codes anymore. I'm still pushing the GitHub.

The message to everyone is rally around Kyle. Demand it right to your local GitHub representative.

I think it's good. I think it's good. I'm happy to amplify that. Yeah, for sure.

Get him on, he comes to San Francisco.

Totally down, totally down. I mean, you know, I think that the interesting thing for members of technical staff, if I can get him off of his sort of like comms, you know, comms locked, like very, very polished, maybe, I don't know, does he have like a cool hobby that he does? Do you know by any chance?

No, I don't know what his hobbies are.

Maybe he's playing golf or something, I don't know.

I don't think Carl's a golfer. I'll ask him after this. I'm curious now, what hobby is it? what hobbies he does have.

Totally, because I think that's always—

He's not like that. He's a man of the people. That's why he could do it. He's a man of the people.

I mean, Carl, if you end up seeing this, come on, come on, members of technical staff.

Make your campaign.

Yes, yes, yes. You'll be seen by the right people. I can promise you that. I think that's actually a good place to wrap unless you have any closing thoughts on this whole saga.

Very sad. I hope for a better future for GitHub. And the world of technology and coding.

Totally.

We'll see how it goes.

Totally. I couldn't agree more. Well, you've been listening to another episode of Members of Technical Stuff. We'll go ahead and see you on the timeline again real soon.