I think that just like it happened with Apple after they made it out of bankruptcy, Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over.
Xamarin is no more, after the whole MAUI rewrite without backwards compatibility to Xamarin.Forms, killing VS4Mac, shortly after having rewriten the underlying Xamarin based IDE into Mac, what survives is a subset of Xamarin tech for mobile and WebAssembly workloads.
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
A proper cross platform IDE experience requires getting Rider.
Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Github even with the previous CEO was already a delivery mechanism for Azure and AI efforts, now it will be full steam ahead, as per new org chart.
VC++ after betting other compilers in C++20 support, seems to have lost its resources struggling to deliver C++23, and also probably affected by the Secure Future Initiative, and decisions for safer languages.
But hey 4 trillion valuation, so from shareholders point of view, everything is going great.
This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.
Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
These are the kind of claims that make some Linux users tiresome to talk to. (Full disclosure: I am also a Linux user).
I'm not defending Microsoft, they are not necessarily my cup of tea, but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).
Feel free to express your opinions, but don't be hateful!
> - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
I don't personally get too attached to devices I purchase or begrudge others for what they buy so, I'm curious what made them "cringe hardware" in your opinion. Adoption aside, they looked like pretty compelling devices to me. Is this a case of buying anything that isn't Apple isn't cool? Or is there something deeper there?
This "Microsoft are good guys" is a bizarre recurring comment that has appeared on HN for quite a while now
It's like pretending people must choose from Russia, North Korea, South Sudan or the Central African Republic
Who are the good guys
None of these companies are "good guys"
These "Leave Microsoft alone" HN comments will undoubtedly persist
Perhaps there are MS employees who comment on HN and they are sensitive about criticism
The idea Microsoft is somehow benign is truly hilarious
It is not difficult to argue the damage this company causes today without retribution is far worse than what they did in the past
IME, Microsoft is very cult-like; the employees believe that Microsoft has a solution for any problem, and there is never, ever any contemplation that the company creates problems ;this does not stop with the employees, it can extend to others who are "bought in" to the Redmond ecosystem
It's always better when companies are hungry for business. I thought that in 2016ish it was super cool for Microsoft to get into Linux, build VS Code, and make bets like the Surface Studio.
For comparison, I think Mac OS in 2008 was also at a bit of a golden age:
- You had native file support for .iso, .zip without needing to install crapware like Winzip.
- You even could preview *.psd files out the box.
- You had first-party apps like Image Capture to scan documents without needing to install extra software.
- There was an amazing third-party app ecosystem with things like Yojimbo, OnyX, Little Snitch, Quicksilver, Handbrake, Coda, Adium.
This was around the time of the "I'm a Mac" campaign when Apple was _hungry_ to win business away from Windows. All of these small, polished advantages made me fall in love with the experience.
OSX today is still good but there definitely isn't that same level of "underdog hunger" showing up in the products as of late.
Anyway I'm just trying to say companies being hungry for business shows up in its products and that's better for consumers.
Talk to some developers with 3-5yoe, they do see Microsoft as a cool company. For them it’s a company that created TypeScript, supports open source, runs NPM, created VSCode etc. None of them thinks of Internet Explorer, Zune, or anti competitive behavior. You will always associate MS with these failures, the generation after you won’t
> making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The 25 year window you picked actually coincides almost exactly with the time since the original X-Box was launched. Seems an odd omission from the list of hardware MS released in that time period.
Also the IntelliMouse Explorer was released in late 1999, which nobody who has ever had to clean the gunk off a mouseball roller would describe as ‘cringe’.
eh, they had short blip in the relatively recent history, especially with developers, in mid 2010s.
With dotnet core 1-3 - open source cross platform .net, that was modern, fresh and clearly a project done by developers for developers. add vscode to this and it seems nice.
but as soon as 5 hit, if you look into details, they went to their usual bullshit, starting with stapling together winforms and wpf to it. the feel of the project shifted from 'developers for developers' to usual top down management.
vscode is also a weird case - it looks open source, but isn't at all(the builds you get aren't just from the same codebase + no access to extensions legally if you build your own, or fork it)
- Abandoned the worst web browser in existence. That they created :)
- Abandoned ActiveX (29 years ago), Silverlight (4 years ago)
+ Opened .NET to more platform than just Windows. It can now run very well on Linux, Mac, etc.
+ Made many of its locked down stuff open source - .NET, Z3, hell there was that few weeks ago open sourcing of the WinUI framework, etc.
+ Pivoted towards the cloud where OSS software synergizes with their cloud offerings.
Do they do corrupt deals with governments? Well yes, but so does every other big corp. And making cringe hardware isn't a crime in itself.
Do they still do a lot of shady shit? You bet, but they only started getting worse a few years ago. You are thinking it doesn't come in waves and it was all evil, all the time.
This is bullshit, the Zune was great and was doing incredibly well, at least around here.
It was THE device to have, people were going crazy for them; there was enough pent up demand that people were breaking windows and sliding into cars to get them.
I don't know where you've been the last decade, but it's clear they have been perceived this way. Him describing that perception only to be ridiculed by you is a pretty low blow.
Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies. Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best.
Microsoft is the Walmart of operating system providers, that happened to buy a popular Git hosting site and briefly made noises that seemed not awful.
In terms of coolness, Microsoft peaked right around the time they were hiring the cast of Friends to promote their OS.
- A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
- Aimless products like the Vision Pro that seems to have failed as the "get the devs excited" premium SDK launch everyone described it as
- Rocky start issues on Apple Intelligence, nerfed Siri, etc.
- Unexciting iPhone launch and lots of ridicule levied on Liquid Glass
It's the laptop to get for compute/battery, which definitely is not nothing, but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
> Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies.
They are very different companies in very different businesses. Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a software company. That affects everything (and is why the two are not fundamentally competitors).
I don't think one has ever been better behaved than the other at all, though. The main difference is that for most of their time, Microsoft was just in a position where it could do more harm than Apple.
Do they? I feel like this is a bimodal thing from what I've seen of other peoples opinions - they're either amazing and all you ever use, or they're the worst company ever.
As a developer I've always seen Macs as a necessary evil - they were the only polished "working out of the box" unix-like system you could buy for a long time but you had to put up with locked down software, comically bad pricing and cooling issues.
Now with the Mx stuff the hardware is amazing, and pretty fantastic value for money if you avoid the weird points in the price scale where they massively overcharge for RAM. But you still have to use their locked down software stack and ecosystem.
> Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best.
This love for Apple seems to be a very US-American thing.
But I've yet to meet a person that said, "Oh, Rachel and Chandler from Friends... maybe Windows IS cool!". It wasn't cool, it wasn't anything. Apple was trendy with the designers and creative types, and Windows was what you probably used at your doldrums day job. The only place where MS has ever been "cool" is with gamers. I think your "Walmart" analogy is a perfect one.
I used to think that way, and I’m not rushing to apply to Microsoft, but I do notice the various divisions, studios, stock price growth and comparable RSU packages that all make me totally forget about its antiquated branding and association
Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
I guess generating hype by acquisition and increase valuation cause more profit than developing a real product.
I'm beginning to think that using Microsoft services(yes, GitHub included) is morally questionable behaviour right now. I can't support the current Microsoft behaviour of laying off many employees so casually.
Yes, the whole XBox division has been a mess, especially after ABK.
However XBox plus Microsoft Gaming Studios, is still one of the biggest group of AAA publishers, they have a big enough slice of the market.
Hence why now they're dominating PlayStation charts with cross-platform games.
Many Microsoft haters don't have an good enough idea of how big they have become on games industry, regardless of layoffs and such.
SteamOS keeps being around until they feel like doing a netbooks like move, taking all their games out of Steam, or whatever else Microsoft might think of.
Hence why I regularly complain Valve should keep trying to bring developers to target GNU/Linux natively instead of translating Windows games.
It's funny. Nobody complains that there is a lack of free multi-platform desktop GUI profiling tools for Go, Python, Ruby, Elixir etc. Somehow we just accept those languages are only for web services, web apps, and command-line utilities.
What is the problem with Microsoft keeping "nice to have" desktop GUI stuff for their own proprietary ecosystem when everything else has open sourced? Including the primitives needed for the community to build their own GUI and developer tooling stuff, just like JetBrains did with Rider.
> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
On HN I keep hearing that associating .NET with Windows is outdated perception.
Writing JVM languages I feel that the developer experience is pretty much the same on any OS. It seems this cannot be said for .NET?
If you're writing a server or a web app then its good and runs well.
Visual Studio is still not ported to Linux or Mac, you need to use Rider or VSCode. If you use JetBrains for Java, using Rider will feel good no matter where you are.
The GUI library situation is a tough one. In many ways its far more advanced than other languages but their newest attempt is not as good as the older Windows only API. But what other language is graded for its great native GUI library?
I'm not calling MS cool but at the same time I think the goalposts are different.
It can. DX is pretty much the same for backend and CLI stuff using VS Code on Mac, Linux and Windows. I'm working daily on C# backend and CLI stuff on a Mac (those are the dev machines at my employer). DX is on par with Go and Rust (at least dotnet CLI, LSP, Debugger, I can't speak for the profiler as I've never used it). I like the Rust tooling most, but dotnet CLI is not far behind.
Language and std lib wise, C# sits in the sweet spot.
We have a few .NET applications running on the infrastructure on Linux hosts and it's just like every other thing.
But in some contexts, e.g. PowerBI, it pulls in a dependency and BOOM it's Windows Only to the point that not even Wine or Proton can help you. For something, that should be, mind you, a dumb SQL proxy like the PowerBI Embedded Gateway.
I love C# and .NET is amazing for some specific use cases like REST APIs but there's so much stuff that just doesn't work or needs a lot more effort to get somewhere.
MAUI is a mess.
Blazor will never work as a general solution for full stack web apps. Even if a small app didn't have to download like 10MB of WASM code the DX is terrible and performance just as bad. Elixir Phoenix developed with a fraction of the budget is just so far ahead.
C# hot reload has been broken for years. I doubt it will ever be as good as what you get in JS with Vite.
Minimal APIs are a great idea but 4 years later and still fundamental features like validation are missing (it's coming in .NET 10).
They've been investing a ton of effort into Aspire. It's cool but is it more important than core features?
And now with AI, Microsoft is more distracted than ever and I'm starting to regret getting into .NET at all.
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales - I think MSFT doesn't care just as they don't care about GUI workloads, because only thing they care now is having developers run their stuff on Azure. You don't need VS for those cloud .NET apps and you don't need front end frameworks like Forms, Xamarin or MAUI. Seems like C++ is also something they would not be interested investing into when they can get people into cloud easier with C#.
Why do people need to create anthropomorphising narratives around companies? Don't be any company's cheerleader, use the stuff that's best for you (and the environment)
Microsoft not being terrible was a zero interest rate phenomenon. The news today is a lot worse than just Github not being independent anymore. It sounds like literally the entire development division is being rolled into this "Core AI" business unit.
When Nadella announced plans to double the company's revenue by 2030, it was pretty clear that the enshitifiction was going to ramp up significantly, but it doesn't seem like it will ever relent now that they have to squeeze out more free cash flow to cover all of this AI capex. Windows is practically malware at this point, they've made extremely deep cuts to .NET engineering headcount, and it's just going to get worse.
fifteen years ago I predicted that if we ever have a bloody AI revolution, the most likely case would be that it would be Microsoft's fault because they are the kings of unintended consequences.
The second most likely case being some AI figuring out how to hack AWS to steal compute time, probably by getting access to billing information.
Microsoft seems to be slowly pulling ahead at the moment.
I remember all the PR about Satya Nadella making the company cool, modern, user-friendly, and open source friendly. Thought wow, he must also be a hypnotist.
I couldn't believe the number of people who were saying that "Microsoft are the good guys now" or "Microsoft loves open source now".
Microsoft stopped openly attacking open source at a time when open source was clearly winning:
- most servers were running linux
- most phones and tablets were running android
- people were buying tablets instead of desktops
- Google was openly promoting open source through GSOC
- large corporations were regularly releasing their tools as open source
Most importantly, developers openly hated Microsoft for holding the industry back (remember IE6?).
So they did what any good corporations does - they went along with the winning side.
And now they they have positive emotional connotations in devs' minds, or at least organizational buy-in again, they can do what corporations do best - making money by abusing their position with barely any competition.
---
The lesson here are:
- Corporations should simply not have this amount of power.
- Corporations are amoral, they don't have values, views or beliefs. They are systems designed for optimizing goals. You can never _trust_ a corporation - not because they are untrustworthy but because trust is a human-to-human level concept, it does not have any meaning in human-to-system interaction.
I think big corporations are not amoral, they are immoral. There is no wealth that has been built obeying morality or showing emphaty. Once them two become obstacles for profits, they will be thrown out.
This is an odd comment. Xamarin has never been relevant. GitHub is historically OSS focused. Xamarin was some weird niche product for Windows devs. Hardly any overlap with GitHub’s core audience. I don’t know what will happen next, but hodgepodge of weird MS tech isn’t the lens to view this through.
No, but I code for Microsoft platforms since MS-DOS 3.3, so one gets to know how it all works, when having read so many docs, MSJ articles, MSDN, PDC and BUILD sessions, podcats and what not.
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Can you elaborate on why you believe that? I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework. I mean, their Win32 API is still alive and well, as well as MFC, ATL, etc. WPF still gets some minor updates too here and there.
I have no idea what you mean by web, too. ASP.NET is perhaps one of the better maintained web frameworks around. What exactly do you interptet as a concern?
Blazor is also Microsoft's alternative to JavaScript and it's main value proposition is being able to write webassembly apps using Microsoft technology exclusively. What do you think is replacing this?
Pointing out Aspire is even weirder. It's a containerization framework to help with observability and manage distributed applications. What exactly is the overlap?
I sense a great deal of confusion in your comments. What exactly are you trying to say?
> I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework.
WinUI3 is dead, lol. I tried to migrate from UWP to WinUI3, but it is literally dead. There doesn’t seem to be any team at MS actively working on it, the community calls have died, and the last build conf didn’t have any WinUI3 talks, all AI stuff. Yes, you can build apps with WinUI3, but development and support for it has stalled and I couldn’t justify moving the companies product over to WinUI3.
No they aren't placing all their chips on WinUI3, only those that never went through all reboots since Windows 8, believe that.
WPF got taken out of legacy mode at BUILD 2024, exactly because hardly anyone outside Redmond cares about WinUI 3.
Anyone that has been long enough around, has seen ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Core MVC (not compatible with MVC 5 predecessor), Razor Pages, Minimal APIs, Blazor,...
So it is a mess doing consulting and depending on what .NET version the customer team is allowed to use, and existing code, what gets to be used by that portfolio.
Minimal APIs have been designed to bring in Python and JavaScript developers into .NET, which many of us see as not working at all, while having created the need now everyone creates their own controllers infractruture, as means to tame having minimal APIs all over the place, there are even MVVM like frameworks now for that purpose.
Blazor is really only usable as path forward for those still stuck in WebForms, due to the similar approach to do Web UIs, and to .NET shops without frontend teams.
In the age of distributed computing with microservices and frontend teams, it is a hard sell to make them adopt Blazor and learn C#, instead of React, Angular, Vue.
At least they have adopted TypeScript, the next language that Anders Hejlsberg decided to focus on.
Aspire is something that has been pivoted, now they try to sell it as Microsoft's Pulumi, but everyone has to write the orchestration code in C#, thus only relevant to .NET shops.
Maddy Montaquila has said in a few .NET podcast interviews that they are trying to use Aspire as means to sell .NET to UNIX shops, given the low adoption numbers outside the traditional Microsoft shops, even after almost a decade being open source.
I’ve been in the industry for 30 years professionally and 10 years as hobbyist who paid as much attention to the industry as one could before the internet in the 80s early 90s including lying as a 9th grader pretending to be a big spender to get a free subscription to MacWeek and PCWeek.
At no point in time was Microsoft one of the cool guys.
Rider is far better than VS for everything apart from Desktop UI Apps and perhaps Blazor WASM hot reloading, which is itself far behind the UX of JS/Vite hot reloading, so I avoid it and just use Blazor static rendering. Otherwise VS tooling is far behind Intellij/Rider for authoring Web dev assets, inc. TypeScript.
I switched to Rider/VS Code long before moving to Linux, which I'm happy to find works just as well in Linux. Not a fan of JetBrains built-in AI Integration (which IMO they've fumbled for years), but happy with Augment Code's Intellij Plugin which I use in both Rider and VS Code.
I have been a .NET dev for the past 8 years and have switched fully to Rider. The only thing I miss from VS is the quick nav to see all the properties and methods in a file on the top bar. Everything else is vastly better:
- Auto complete is a bit smarter (even the free AI suggestions are better)
- Refactoring across files is often faster
- Package management is undoubtedly the latest performance difference. I would go from taking 1-2 minutes from using VS's "Manage packages for solution" to under 10 seconds in Rider.
- In VS there's always a noticeable delay when the debugger hits a breakpoint / exception and the IDE takes a few seconds to actually display. This is about halved in Rider.
- The built in terminal is vastly better than VS's, though not as good as Windows Terminal
VS - great if you are Windows only shop for dev and want all the bells and whistles
Rider - has all of the the nice things JetBrains does and the best option on Mac if you need advanced refactoring; UI feels a bit cluttered at time (though they improved this).
VSC - for whatever reason, I always end up back to VSC for .NET for backends. Good enough, fast, and lightweight enough. Plays nicely with Node and full-stack monorepos.
I would commit to VSC and try to make it work. If you find you need advanced refactoring support, then try out Rider.
Rider is very nice and a perfectly competent development environment. It gets first class support and often has the ability to test preview features from dotnet upcoming language and runtimes.
It's biggest problem is that it's not Visual Studio, so it is very hard for people who have lived in VS for a decade to move over.
It does away with some bloat and also provides some features of Resharper natively instead of as an extension.
You can quite literally use this as your primary development environment.
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
... what?
They could do a better job with the native frameworks, but the rest of these are completely unrelated. For web, MVC is pretty much dead and you might want to use Blazor SSR instead. Web API via controllers is still supported, but minimal API endpoints are the hot thing. Blazor is being treated as a first class product. Aspire is there to assist in local orchestration of distributed applications... and is built on Blazor.
Exactly that, now try to pick the best one of all of those on enterprise projects, depending on the version they are using, and there is no budget for updates.
Visual Studio Code seems to be their big open source push, besides GitHub. Everyone uses it, and most development environments and UX are based on it. Used to be Atom, I remember.
Pedantic, but VS Code does not share a lineage with Atom, besides the fact that it is built on Electron (which was, admittedly, originally built for Atom.)
I don't understand how VS Code is an "open source push". It's technically open source, but open source doesn't seem to be strategically important to it.
Heard of Apple Game Porting Toolkit? That's built on the back of Wine.
Microsoft has been open sourcing a bunch of their programs for a while now too. Majority are inconsequential but they are still nice to see. People on Linux OS's are excited about Microsoft calculator being open source but these open source projects still show that some people there have interest in the push.
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
This is Microsoft's primary strategy. There are a lot of victims out there.
... he says after spending several months porting a win32 app to Silverlight as part of a Gold Partner/MS case study with much fanfare, only to have to spent the next few years backporting everything into the win32 app it never replaced, and then it was shit canned and only the win32 version remains.
We're planning to rewrite it in Qt at some point as some of our customers use RHEL.
I once worked for a company which outsourced the development of a Silverlight app for $1 million and then canned the whole thing one year later. It's just crazy how these life-changing amounts of money are thrown around like garbage in this industry.
> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only,
The monetisation of .NET is less about selling Windows licences, and more about selling Azure compute etc. The OS used on Azure is less relevant, you pay MS either way.
You can run .net without azure very easily. I personally have 4x web apps written in .net 8, razor. They used to be on a aws windows instance years ago but it was overly expensive for what I needed. Then I switched them to a small digital ocean server running ubuntu. When I started these apps I wrote them on windows 7 for windows server. I switched the server probably 2 years ago. I recently made the switch off of windows to ubuntu as my daily driver, instead of going to 11. Everything still works great. I do miss visual studio, but I am getting used to linux and its tools now. Point is, server is running and there is zero azure involved.
You really think Microsoft has been ”cool” for the past decade or so?
First the rampant spyware, then they gradually wreck every single piece of software into unusable buggy AI-slop-mess just to play the trashy MBA valuation games.
I still hold nostalgic value for the old OSes (say up to XP/7) but everything after has been nothing but maximal profit extraction.
The '90s/00s era of people hating on M$ and picturing them as the Borg had left room to the 10s/20s of MS being "friendly" and releasing open source and free things (typescript, vs code, core.net, wsl, work on python etc) and not completely screwing up acquisitions like GitHub or Mojang.
Windows became adware, and office became some crappy online thing, but _microsoft_ had became nicer and gained goodwill.
This seems to have started evaporating in the last year or so.
My deepest concern at this time isn't that AI eventually gets written down to nothing; because I don't think it will. Its that these companies are so scared of being out-competed by an AI-first competitor that they're willing to make deep sacrifices to their core businesses just to effectively virtue signal that they're AI first and unable to be out-competed.
It is deeply concerning because all things point to reality shaking out with irony. None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it. Apple has nothing, Microsoft wants to put spyware on every Windows computer and builds the worst coding agent on the market despite having privileged access to every line of source code ever written, Meta put a chatbot in Whatsapp then decided paying researchers ten mil would solve their problems, Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.
Their fear is going to lose them everything. Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed. Everyone learned that lesson and decided "we'll never be unwilling to innovate ever again"; but now their core product stable undergoes constant churn that is pissing off customers and driving competition to eat their lunch.
There is long-term, durable beauty in investing majority effort into making Github the single best place to host and organize code. That need is never going away. There is also necessity in ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world, no one doubts that, but its a matter of proportion and humility. Microsoft/Github will never build AI products that lead the market. Its not a technology problem; its an organizational and political one. But that's ok, because they could dominate the market with the world's best code hosting platform, an average AI strategy, and a library of integrations with the rest of the frontier world.
> Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.
NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product.
YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.
I think folks sleep on Google around here. They are slow but they have so many compelling iterative AI usecases that even a BigTech org can manage it eventually.
Apple and Microsoft are rightly getting panned, Apple in particular is inexcusable (but I think they will have a unique offering when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for).
Google was the absolute king of AI (previously "ML") for at least 10 years of the last 20. They are also an absolute behemoth of tech and have consistently ranked among the most valuable companies in the world for multiple years, valued at trillions of dollars today. Hell, they're on version 7 and production year 10 of their custom AI ASIC family.
When considering the above, the amount of non-force-fed "modern AI" use they've been able to drive is supposed to be shown by things to the level of a question button on YouTube and some incremental overlaying of Gemini to Docs? What does that leave the companies without the decade head start, custom AI hardware, and trillions to spend to look to actually do worth a damn in their products with the tech?
I'm (cautiously) optimistic AI will have another round or two of fast gains again in the next 5 years. Without it I don't think it leaves the realm of niche/limited uses in products in that time frame. At least certainly not enough that building AI into your product is expected to make sense most of the time yet.
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
lol if this is the perfect example, "AI" in general is in a sad place. I've tried to use it a handful of times and each time it confidently produced wrong results in a way that derailed my quest for an answer. In my experience it's an anti-feature in that it seems to make things worse.
The best and latest Gemini Pro model is not SOTA. The only good things it has are the huge context and the low API price. But I had to stop using it because it kept contradicting itself in the walls of text it produces. (My paid account was forced to pay for AI with a price hike so I tried for a couple of months to see if I could make it work with prompt engineering, no luck).
Google researchers are great, but Engineering is dropping like a stone, and management is a complete disaster. Starting with their Indian McKinsey CEO moving core engineering teams to India.
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
I remember when I was trying to find a YouTube video, I remembered the contents but not the name. I tried google search and existing LLMs including Gemini, and none could find it.
It would also be useful for security: give the AI a recording and ask when the suspicious person shows up, the item is stolen, the event happens, etc. But unfortunately also useful for tyranny…
The biggest counterexample would be that dead-ai-autotranslate-voice sucking every gram of joy out of watching your favourite creators, with no ability to turn it off.
Yeah to be clear, I think Google is the strongest in AI product development of the FAANG companies. I included them in the list because the most complaints I see about AI product integration among FANNG comes from Google products; the incessant bundling of Gemini chatboxes in every Workspace product.
This isn't me defending apple, but, let me play out a little scenario:
"hey siri, book me tickets to see tonight's game"
"sure thing, champ"
<<time passes>>
"I have booked the tickets, they are now in your apple wallet"
<<opens up wallet, sees that there is 1x £350 ticket to see "the game", a interactive lesson in pickup artistry>>
You buy apple because "it works" (yes, most of that is hype, but the vertical integration is actually good, not great for devs/tinkerers though.) AI just adds in a 10-30% chance of breaking what seems to be a simple workflow.
You don't notice with chatGPT, because you expect it to be the dipshit in your pocket. You don't expect apple to be shit. (although if you've tried to ask for a specific track whilst driving, you know how shit that is. )
What you're describing would seem to be a borderline miraculously positive thing. Every single generation of tech companies starts off absolutely amazing. Then they get big, and in surprisingly rapid order enter into the abyss from which they never return
But in modern times the particularly level level of big, scaling back of anti-competitive law enforcement, and a government increasingly obsessed with making [economic] number go up, regardless of the cost, have all created a situation where the current batch is dying a lot slower than they probably otherwise would.
If 'AI' is the pandora's box of self destruction that can move the show along to the next batch of companies, then it'll have been worth the trillions of dollars in investment after all!
I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle. When Standard Oil held a monopoly on the oil world, it was mostly possible because they were monopolizing a discrete set of natural resources. Tech isn't that: Especially with AI lowering the barrier of entry to learning and generating code, tech is extremely resource-unconstrained. The main resource we fight over is just humans who have the ability and desire to spend money.
I also don't feel it will happen in "rapid order". These companies are too big. Its happening business-unit by business-unit. In the far future, these companies will still exist, just heavily optimized into the much smaller handful of units that still generate profit.
intel.com's <title> says "Simplify Your AI Journey - Intel". Their description meta tag says "Deliver AI at scale across cloud, data center, edge, and client with comprehensive hardware and software solutions." Their frontpage mentions "AI" 9 times, but has only 3 mentions of "processor" and zero of "CPU".
I know they make processors, but they sure don't make it seem that way.
Yes, I find it greatly satisfying that these mega companies are turning away their most important asset: super qualified people capable of creating new products. They're basically betting on their own extinction.
> Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed.
Is it though? There's a reason why Microsoft's JVM competitor is called ".NET". They were planning Windows .NET Server 2003, Office.NET, etc.
I don't think an inversion of the hype cycle, it's just another hype cycle exactly. I think, in fact, it's extremely comparable. I remember people joking about Pets.com -- just imagine buying your pet food online?!? Crazy stuff. AI is the same. It's hyped up massively, there will eventually be some kind of correction, and then it'll become the new normal.
Only a sentence later do I explicitly reference Github Copilot; yet they belong on the list because despite having every advantage a company could have, the resources of a megacorporation, all the source code in the world, the semi-independence of a smaller team; they still managed to produce a mediocre and uninteresting product.
But, again: I think that state for Copilot is totally fine for Github. That product state of "its there, its builtin, and its fine" is a fantastic and extremely efficient market to service.
I always hear this but people use Siri all the time, and I think outside of talking to programmers, a lot of consumers probably consider that the level of AI they care about using. "is Siri really AI" seems like a real "is a hotdog a sandwich" question. Who cares? People eat hot dogs and talk to Siri.
It seems what Apple has less of is LLM products that cost enormous sums of money to make that people don't like using. Sure, they have a little of it, they fell flat on their faces with their news summaries thing last year and AppleVision was a nothingburger, but when it comes to "sinking huge amounts of money into deeply unpopular ventures", it seems to me that Apple's reluctance to deploy its largess here might be prudent. It seems like they're less exposed on the hype.
I do wish Siri was a little more intelligent to be honest.
I use Siri when I need a fast, distraction-free, action. Which makes it perfect when driving or performing other tasks where my hands a busy and/or I cannot put my attention on my phones LCD screen.
The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction.
I'd love it if Siri was smart enough to differentiate between:
- an automation request. eg setting an alarm or ringing a contact. The kind of interaction what you wouldn't want to offload to a 3rd party but is the kind of interaction where you don't need vast datastores of training.
- and an open-ended question. eg What time are Oasis playing in London tonight? Who was the 23rd President of Germany? What are the rules of Dodgeball? these sort of things are less confidential and don't require handing control of your phone to a 3rd party.
And I'd love it if Siri automatically offloaded from their local AI to ChatGPT (or whatever) when the latter was identified. That should be opt in, but when opted in, it should be automatic. I shouldn't have to consent each time after I've opted in.
I'm not sure if you're in a country that has already received some upgrade, but over here in Europe Siri is seen as a funny tamagochi that sometimes misunderstands and thinks its needed and is then quickly told to shut up.
I think the last time I talked to anyone about siri we were wondering why it was still so bad, now that we have LLMs.
I know they've gotten shit for years, it's not gonna make you fluent, etc etc
But I've defended them because it's at the very least a good starting point and something to keep you consistent every day. As long as you're trying to be mindful about learning, I've found it to be a great tool to assist in improving my Spanish.
That is until a month or 2 ago where they completely overhauled their curriculum with AI slop. The stories are bland at best and confusing at first, the questions are brain-dead simple, it'll have sentences and questions that I've confirmed with native speakers are confusing/incorrect, it's riddled with mistakes, and somehow they even broke the TTS so it'll pronounce things wrong. One of the character voices consistently can't say a couple of letters, like it pronounces all the 'd's with 'v's or something. I can't believe they actually shipped it in this state, they completely broke it overnight. At this rate if it's not fixed by the time my annual subscription is up to renew, I will be cancelling.
It's absolutely the worst AI slopification of any product I use, and the CEO and everyone who pushed to ship it needs to be fired.
Yes I've been chronicling the enshittification of Duolingo here for several years (below). But unlike Github/CoreAI, DuoLingo is tied to a single (and imperilled) revenue-stream from a single product, plus they had a 7/2021 IPO in the heady days of Covid, so they started out in a subscriber market awash with cash. Also like other sites with a formerly vibrant community and forums, they rug-pulled the way they extracted value from the user community's posts then copyright-washed it through AI, then turned around and tried to remarket it back to said users ('Duolingo Max = Super Duolingo + features like AI-powered "Explain My Answer" and "Roleplay" options for more advanced practice'). While laying off thousands of their contractors and translators.
going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me.
Clozemaster is much more rudimentary but I do like how they use AI - there's a single button that gives you an AI grammatical summary of the translation and calls out any idioms or grammatical conventions in the target language compared to your native one.
Bought the lifetime license but it's free to use, you just get a limited amount of flash cards a day. If you wait until christmas there's generally a big discount on the lifetime license.
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it.
Oh my God, tell me about it. Our C levels are being fed bullshit by all of our vendors about how AI is going to transform their business. Every few weeks I have to ask "what the fuck does that mean exactly?" "Oh, well, agentic AI and workflows blah blah."
Ok? You want a chatbot? Fine, we're still building a state machine. At best, the LLM is doing expensive NLP to classify the choices.
Something something classify support tickets? Alright, but we're still just doing keyword search, LLMs literally aren't even needed.
I love LLMs and get a lot of use out of them for coding, but I still don't see anywhere that they're going to fit in for core business functions. Anything that is proposed can and should be done without LLMs. I'm just not seeing where they can be useful until they are truly AGI. Until then, it's just expensive NLP.
It's very funny that for pretty much any use case of LLMs, they're either too expensive or too incapable or both! There may be a few uses that make sense, but it seems to be incredibly hard to find the balance.
I think there's a lot of really interesting (and profitable) AI products out there. And: there's so many more that can be built. We're only scratching the surface of what the industry has already invented can do. Not in an "AGI Inevitable" capacity; what we have, today, with more context engineering, better user interfaces, better products with deeper AI-first thinking, etc.
My point was more-so that FAANG isn't even scratching the surface; they're punching it bloody with their fists while yelling "look at all this AI we have, see dad we can't be disrupted we're the disrupters we're the disrupters".
It reminds me a lot of Xbox over the past six years, so much so that I think Xbox is a canary for how many business units in these companies will look in five more years.
I've been in a three different scenarios where I worked for independent companies under the umbrella of a large parent organization. In all 3, the leadership left or was fired, and the remainder of the company was merged into a division of the parent company.
The product quality went to shit in all 3 scenarios. There were different reasons and nuances to them all, but all 3 boiled down to one common factor. Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
They all turned into political battles at the leadership level, low morale at the product level, and decent jobs for the engineers as long as they were happy just doing what they were told. For the customers, everything just stagnated. It took years before all the politics sorted themselves out, people chose whether to stay or go, and you got product leadership running who could balance it all out without the baggage of the merger.
So as a Github customer, this does not have me running for the hills. We won't lose functionality. But we won't gain anything we truly desire either - we'll see new features come out that relate to Microsoft's dreams, not our own. At a strategic level, I'd start telling my teams to be sure not to get vendor-locked to any Github features, and always have a migration plan at least conceptualized so that once we see where it all really goes, we are well prepared to either stay or go depending on exactly what Microsoft does in the next couple years.
> Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
GitHub has been ignoring customers' desire for IPv6 support for years[0], whereas Microsoft got IPv6 running on Windows NT 4.0 in 1998[1], so there might be a silver lining here.
From a product POV, GitHub seems like a solved problem. It's been working well-enough with the current feature set for over a decade, with many companies building themselves on top of its stack. If they stagnate in MS bureaucracy but keep the lights on for push/pull/PRs, that's probably good enough for most people until something completely changes how software is made.
The problem is that someone still has to polish their resume when working for GitHub (aka resume-driven development), so, they're actually making GitHub worse now:
I think GitHub also doesn't have the same vendor lock-in that other companies do. I am very happy with their service, and I wouldn't want to move off of it. But at the same time there are numerous alternatives and it wouldn't be that hard to switch. Because, as you say, it is pretty much a solved problem, and because of that there are several competitors with feature parity at this point.
I also want to add that there are large industries that LOVE Microsoft and LOVE the Azure/365 vendor lock-in. This corporate merger might be added value to those customers. (Azure has their own github called Azure DevOps and - from what I have seen - is quite bad, but deeply integrated into Azure stuff)
ADO is just the rebranded Visual Studio Team Services which is just the rebranded Team Foundation Service (which itself is the cloud version of ADO/VST/TF Server). It isn't really integrated in Azure aside from the naming, and it is intended to be more of a Jira/Bitbucket/etc replacement than GitHub.
Azure DevOps is.... okay. It's functional, and it's not really anything unique or innovative; but it never really strived to be anything like that. It started out as the online, service-based version of Team Foundation Server and was very clearly being cultivated into turning into "Github, but integrated into the Azure ecosystem" and that particular strategic need evaporated for Microsoft when they acquired the actual Github.
Azure DevOps went into zombie mode basically the same day the acquisition closed; I don't think it's received any new features since 2018.
1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.).
2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work.
3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed.
How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.
The best answer I can give myself to your (perhaps rhetorical) question is twofold:
- tech companies, for whatever reason, seem to need millions and millions of funding upfront to get started. Despite a tech company not needing essentially any asset (besides a few workstations and internet connections?). The VC era inherently created a huge distortion so that it's virtually impossible to start something without selling your soul to those who want you to be exactly like the others. You will be laughed out of the door from banks if you try to get some credit. Since the tech economy has been essentially a proxy for financial speculation, building a sustainable business that doesn't aim solely to IPO and "growth" is an idea that won't get any money to anybody. All of this to say, if workers today want to fund a co-op, as I want to, they need to wait until they have enough money saved to bootstrap it themselves.
- until now, and for maybe a while longer, the job market for tech workers has been fairly comfortable, with perks and high wages. Things are clearly changing, as the streak of layoffs post-2021 shows. For a sector with low unionization and with the extreme pressure from companies to reduce workers power, I think in the next 5-10 years tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs. Once that will be the case, the incentive to do effectively a bullshit job in a big(ger) org - which many of us do, building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value - will not be there anymore, and I want to hope more people will choose alternative paths like co-ops and to develop products with different goals.
>How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Funny you should ask this. A co-worker was unironically glazing monarchies and suggested some books to me when we were drinking at dinner Friday. I was disgusted, tbh. But do not underestimate the desire of people to be ruled and told how to think and act.
I've seen enough: as the recognised authority and designated responsible person ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525256 I'm officially recognising this as the final end of 2010s Cool Microsoft.
> 74 points by leoc on April 3, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler
> Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad old ways).
Thank you, this does not get discussed enough on HN. I used to look forward to monthly releases of VSCode and actually read the changelog carefully to see what new features/enhancements I could make use of. These days I just glance and ignore it completely -- almost everything is Copilot, MCP blahblah. Such a disappointment.
You would think with all the AI magic, they would deliver more "core editor" features/enhancement. No, just more Copilot.
I can confidently predict that the breakout dev tool in the next few years will have LLM features, but won’t have forgotten stuff like editing features. As Claude Code has already demonstrated, you do t even need an editor for good LLM integration.
> “Just like how Bill [Gates] had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory,” said Parikh [the CoreAI team lead].
That Bill Gates analogy seems rather far-fetched, though.
Let's think about MicroSoft back in the 90s. There are no agent factories, whatever they are, but non-programmers are using Visual Basic, Excel, and Access to write their own software. Maybe throw in some ASP as well. (What if ClippyGPT had been available back in the day?) So thinking about that, if you ignore the buzzwords and squint, it kind of looks familiar.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with GitHub. Will they ~~agentify~~ enshittify Visual Source Safe as well?
We could barely convince the reviewers on the last review that using GitHub is okay as long as we take some extra steps, I guess we should prepare to switch to a different platform with the next review.
it seems like anyone continuing to use github is ok with providing free labor to Microsoft. Not that that wasn't the case already, but now it seems especially blatant. "open source" is just corporate welfare at this point.
I just switched from Github to Gitlab. For anyone who is interested in doing the same, but doubtful because of the effort required: Gitlab has a pretty good migration tool. You authenticate against your github account and gitlab will import all your repos for you. We've been using gitlab at work for a bit and the CI/CD took a little getting used to but I'm overall happy with Gitlab.
Some people think a github presence is important for their personal portfolios/careers, but I've personally never seen any evidence that a recruiter or anyone has ever actually looked at my github profile. Plus I can just put gitlab on there instead now
I have worked for companies using GitLab and I really liked it. I need to have just about a dozen of my repos that kind of have to be on GitHub because of integrations with third parties, but most would live fine on GitLab.
EDIT: just looked, GitLab seems caught up in AI agent hype also, and have their prices gone up?
It's not that simple; their CI workflow architectures are completely different. The way projects and permissions work are completely different. The entire way GitLab organizes the taxonomy is different.
When all public code including GPL and AGPL has been stolen and plagiarized already and the fabled artificial intelligence is nowhere to be seen, stealing all the private and proprietary code will surely make all the difference.
It probably won't but reselling the code to its owners is still good business. Convince people that statistical models of copyrighted work (which can reproduce said copyrighted work both verbatim or disguised) are A"I" and sadly, somehow, most people seem OK with it.
Am I the only one who found Dohmke’s communication style to be… buzzword forward? For a company whose roots were in pragmatic engineering, I always felt that there was a too-heavy component of hype, particularly around AI, in pretty much every recent public announcement. Yet, despite all the rhetoric and GitHub’s superior position in the industry, they failed to capture the current AI editor market.
Structurally, it seems to make sense for GitHub to be part of Microsoft proper.
Perhaps this is a change for the better.
(PS: despite their “failure” to win hearts and minds, I do recommend giving Copilot in VSCode another look these days. Its agentic mode is very good and rapidly improving; I find it comparable to Claude Code at this point, particularly when paired with a strong model. Related to structure: I never quite understood the line between what parts of this GitHub made, and what parts of this the vscode and related Microsoft teams made.)
Not disregarding all the success MS has had under Nadella but his comms style is also extremely buzzword forward, so there was probably a _synergy_ there
Not too surprising considering how big a lead Github had in the generative coding space and how it managed to give it all up to a half dozen different companies over the last few years. An executive shakeup was long overdue.
For Microsoft it probably makes a lot of sense. For me as a Github user, I don't need "generative coding space" from github at all. That's not what I have been using it for for many years, and that's not what I want to use it for. I mean, Copilot is nice and useful but has preciously little to do with Github per se - if it didn't mention "Github" in the name, I'd see no relationship between the two at all. Code generation belongs in the IDE, Github is not an IDE - Github is what happens before and after the IDE, and keeping it separate works just fine. I'm afraid though Microsoft would try to push them together, and the result would be much worse than the starting point.
Are there any improvements to be done to Git? It seems like kind of a solved problem, like word processors or spreadsheets… most “improvements” to those are diminishing returns.
I don't mean to sounds like an MS apologist, btw. I fully predicted and hoped for an exodus from Github to GitLab or something back when it got acquired — I'm from the Microsux generation.
It's murky what Github's priorities going forward as part of CoreAI will be, and whether it will become even more of a subliminal marketing machine/ content source for AI codegen...
GitHub has (only) $2bn direct revenues (2024; subscriptions + presumably per-usage billing of features like GitHub Actions) but also generates revenue via Copilot, Marketplace (selling tools and integrations).
What are Microsoft CoreAI's revenues? surely >> GH's direct revenues. Hence, GH is likely to become a platform for pushing all sorts of AI revenue streams on its users. I wonder how Microsoft sees that, by segment.
Github at its core is a software lifecycle management product. To keep it running requires skillsets that are much much different from that of Gen AI/ML/whatever. Its hard for me to see this as anything other than an intra corporate political play and not something thats in the best interests of the users or the community. I expect to see a lot of the “legacy Github” folks slowly leave and be replaced by MS/Azure folks (gross). In the short to medium term this is probably gonna affect the stability of the system (its already pretty bad with several outages every month, including silent outages).
> Its hard for me to see this as anything other than an intra corporate political play and not something thats in the best interests of the users or the community.
It's hard for me to see anything Microsoft does as something other than an intra-corporate political play.
I've always used self-hosted https://scm-manager.org for personal stuff and never felt any need to move to anything else. It is a surprisingly good and for some reason not very popular, piece of software.
Forgejo is a really great self-hosted alternative to GitHub.
If you've wondered about hosting your own version of GitHub but have worried it's too hard to set up, I'd encourage you to spend even a few minutes spinning an instance up with Docker Compose and poking around.
I prefer Forgejo, but both it and Gitea support actions like GitHub's. You can have a nice CI/CD pipeline that runs 100% in-house, for free. I adore it for personal projects.
I bounced away from Gitea because they don't (last time I checked) have OIDC. I started[0] trying to revive-and-drive a previous PR[1] to add it, but the test failures are beyond my motivation to investigate and resolve.
While GitHub and GitLab have dedicated design and front-end teams to improve their UI/UX, Gitea and Forgejo aren't large enough to reach that scale, even after Gitea became a company.
For example, look at the number of issues triaged with "UX" [0] or "UX Paper Cut" [1] on GitLab. It is an order of magnitude larger than you would find in any other FOSS option.
In my experience, the "really good" is that it comes batteries included:
- completely docker based CI/CD which makes reasoning about what it's going to do easier than "read through some minified .js from some rando"
- they do have composable CI/CD akin to the GitHub Actions marketplace, but I haven't used it as much in anger to speak to how valuable it is versus "competitive checkbox feature"
- built-in Terraform State, so no more S3 + Dynamo
- highly configurable JWT claim curation for ease of OIDC based access from the pipelines
- good integration between the platform and multiple Kubernetes clusters
- related to that, a strong "review environment" setup
- they were also hinting at being a Sentry replacement, but regrettably I had to switch back to GitHub before that came out of preview so I don't this second know where it stands
GitLab doesn't have an equivalent of GitHub actions (except an alpha-quality prototype).
GitHub Actions can share runtime environment, which makes them cheap to compose. GitLab components are separately launched Docker containers, which makes them heavyweight and unsuitable for small things (e.g. a CI component can't install a dependency or set configuration for your build, because your build won't be running there).
The components aren't even actual components. They're just YAML templates concatenated with other YAML that appends lines to a bash script. This means you can't write smart integrations that refer to things like "the output path of the Build component", because there's no such entity. It's just some bash with some env var.
“Really good” under which metric? Because it is slow, even more confusing after the terrible sidebar redesign and, to quote a famous author, its usage does not spark any joy.
Codeberg and gitea, on the other hand, feel great, like early Github. Fast and simple, instead of a product that’s adding feature on top of half-baked feature to capture the sweet corporate $$$.
I feel like all new AI tools only integrate with GitHub though, like Claude Code. We're actually thinking of moving from GitLab to GitHub, just for this reason.
It's... ok. But many of the really useful features are paid. E.g. merge trains or mandatory reviews.
I also don't think "it's open source!" is a huge differentiator because it's enormous, difficult to deploy from source and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero.
I think Forgejo is probably a way better option at this point even if it is less mature. It's written in Go so way easier to deploy and edit. And none of the features are paid.
I do like Gitlab but... it's not amazing. I liked Phabricator more (except for its lack of integrated CI).
I'll plug another option Gitpatch, however it's pretty early beta and not open-source yet, but most likely will be under AGPL at some point. It has built-in patch stacks (aka stacked PRs) and probably faster than any other Git host out there.
disclosure: I'm the author.
GitLab has a ton of options, And I find myself a bit overwhelmed by the user interface. It really needs a UX lead to simplify and create a better information architecture.
And, if you don't like something there's a very good chance you could be the change you want to see - they have a pretty welcoming contribution culture. Even if you don't want to change something, being able to read the source for it goes a long way toward aligning your understanding of the behavior, and that's not a diss on their usually pretty good documentation
This was inevitable and going towards the direction, but it is sad to see this part of CoreAI division. Copilot and other AI initiatives should not be the primary driver of GitHub's vision.
Github may have more value as the largest software training corpus in the world than as a paid VCS, and Microsoft gets to uniquely utilize that as they will have non rate limited internal APIs and/or dumps to train on.
I assume they already had those APIs - Github was already owned by Microsoft. By prioritizing AI feature over the core experience it's possible that Github stops being the largest software training corpus in the future.
It's not hard to imagine an alternative universe where Github is a steward of innovation for both git and the code review process; alas, this is not the world we live in.
Lots of comments here remind me of the time GitHub was purchased by Microsoft. It would be the dead of GitHub. While in fact it got better: GitHub Actions (pretty neat CI system) happend under Microsoft. Free private repos happend under Microsoft.
Now this time it could be different. But last time wasn't that bad imho.
Microsoft made the GitHub UI significantly worse by rewriting everything in React. It's now slow and bloated. Copying text from the file viewer is a nightmare. And never ever look at how GitHub Actions work under the hood, you will wish you never became a developer.
Gitlab had their CI/CD a few years earlier, Github had no other option. As to which one feels more productive, that's up to personal tastes, for me Gitlab's option seems far more polished.
It did not entirely get better; some things may have improved and some things may have been made worse.
Private repositories is not a feature I use (if I want the files to be private, I will not send them to Microsoft or to someone else, unless they are the intended recipient).
I use GitHub Actions to automatically assign issues to myself,
I think they have changed the HTML in many worse ways; some functions require JavaScripts, etc. They also made mandatory 2FA, and setting it up does not work properly. (I can use the API to get around both issues, for now.)
I'm starting to really detest the AI-everywhere thing. You're starting to feel it absolutely everywhere - good products turning shit just to capitalize on the hype.
It sure is going to be painful migrating everything off github as the bit rot slowly seeps in. The eternal frustration of dead links, the constant astroturfing of LLM generated malware pretending to be what you're looking for, hoping to stumble across a fork in a random user's account.
I made the decision a few months back to go all in on self-hosting, and my own infrastructure. At least once a week I run into something that makes me realize I made the right decision. It's that time of the week again.
I did as well! No issues any worse than people using habitually using "github" to mean "the remote git repository in the cloud".
I expect this will continue indefinitely until the product becomes little more than an AI training corpus and genericized trademark, similar to how our Xerox machines at work are actually made by Brother, while Xerox the actual brand has faded into obsolescence.
I will note that we don't use many of the CI/CD/issue tracking/wiki/etc. features, though both Github and Gitlab offer them. I'm sure they have their own particular quirks that may be a hassle to migrate between and have people relearn. I prefer to keep those tools separate, allowing the git repository be almost exclusively a git repository and spinning up other tools as needed.
We use GitLab ci, issue tracking, dep scanning, everything at work and I can report it is amazing. All self hosted and never had any issues. I’ve got our entire deployment process setup through GitLab ci and it’s been rock solid. It’s $150/month per seat for the ultimate tier, but it’s 100% been worth it for us.
Doesn't GitLab suffer from the same problem of pushing AI? They have many AI features, and position themselves as "The most-comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform".
I'm not using any AI features, and I'm not even aware of any, but I did see it on their website too and it's a bit concerning. My hope is that it's just something they have to say right now and not a strategic direction. Otherwise I will definitely switch to self-hosting, even though the managed CI/CD in the cloud has been working very well for me.
Yeah, GitHub is cooked. Now's a good time to consider migrating to alternative forges like Tangled (https://tangled.sh; bit of a shameless plug, I'll admit. I'm the co-founder). We've got a more advanced PR flow, jujutsu change-id support and we just launched our in-house CI! https://blog.tangled.sh/ci
Long-term, we aim to be the new social coding platform, collectively built in the open.
Tangled is a pretty cool idea, but I'm sorry to say that I'm hoping Gerrit gets a resurgence.
It fits my "do one thing, do it well" philosophy as it doesn't have opinions about CI, Issue trackers or even how you view the code online.
I'll admit that it's a nasty bastard to set up properly though, and the options for viewing repositories are universally terrible when not bundled with a code-review system (like Gitea, Github and Gitlab). Alas.
There are .rpm/.deb packages for Gerrit that make installation/upgrades pretty simple.
The fact that it stores everything in files on disk (no databases except for caches that can be regenerated) makes backup/restore and replication a breeze compared to many other more complicated systems.
You say "forge" and stuff like "collectively built in the open"?
Do you consider the repos "public", "private" or what?
You have a very short privacy policy [https://tangled.sh/privacy], but no guarantees of AI-bot-scraping protection. What if anything is your users' expectation of privacy of their repos against third parties, including malicious ones? Really you need to set that out clearly in your privacy policy.
Not sure I understand your first comment. Repositories are currently public only since we’re built on the AT Protocol, which doesn’t yet have private data (in the works!).
Thanks for the feedback re: the privacy policy. It’s still actively being improved and we
take a lot of effort to protect against AI scrapers. I’ll update the policy verbiage to include that.
Surprised it took this long. I am working with Github sales team on straightening out our Github organization at my new job and it was weird to get a Zoom meeting invite from a company that has been part of Microsoft for nearly 10 years
Microsoft’s software quality is poor. Azure is extremely bloated and difficult to use, and I suspect only gained market traction due to bundling/anti-competitive tactics. Microsoft inserts tabloids news into its operating system.
GitHub is their most trusted “tech” brand by far, and it has their only successful AI product, Co-Pilot.
It’s almost inevitable that GitHub and all its products will be consumed with Microsoft bloat in the next 5 years as more and more products coast off the GitHub brand.
>Microsoft’s CoreAI team is a new engineering group led by former Meta executive Jay Parikh. It includes Microsoft’s platform and tools division and Dev Div teams, with a focus on building an AI platform and tools for both Microsoft and its customers.
This is so confusing. The "CoreAI" team is apparently doing everything except the core of AI, which is LLMs.
Interested to see what East River Source Control [0] are going to build on jujutsu. Not affiliated in anyway but keen to see a GitHub competitor break out to scale, adoption.
I think many of the concerns are valid, but I'm not sure I'd read too much into the name of the absorbing org. Org names at Microsoft end up being misaligned and unintuitive all the time.
While that may be true, I don't think the specific name of the team at Microsoft absorbing GitHub is what's concerning users. I can't think of a team up there that wouldn't be a red flag in this case.
Sorta related, I was thinking recently: after much personal experience with the terrible PR review performance over the last couple years, and the recent blog posts covering terrible performance across GitHub features, I remembered that GitHub is a Microsoft product now.
So I expect everything about the GitHub experience to degrade to (awful, slow, poorly designed) Teams/Outlook quality, since Microsoft doesn't really care about your experience as long as you're locked in and you can eventually accomplish what your job requires of you.
Not surprising. The OpenAI partnership is fading. The GenAI as a product space overall is looking a bit frothy and house of cards-ish. GitHub is a strong product that is ripe for GenAI features that make it more interesting.
Like it or not this makes sense as a business move. Microsoft is positioning itself for the next phase of the current AI hype cycle where standalone AI products will struggle and the “it’s a feature not a product” phase will take hold.
Can’t GitHub just stick to its core business instead of rushing into AI slop? The growth of vibe coding absolutely already benefits GitHub if they maintain the core business.
If they fuck up the core business rushing into AI, then aren’t they likely to get replaced by something else that does the core thing better?
Not to mention all the earnest worries about them reading private codebases to train AI nobody asked for.
You’d think being a trusted source of truth for many critical codebases would be “enough”
The GitHub website experience is already messed up with forcing Copilot into everything. But then asking for user feedback about new setting options for issues but denying any request for a user default.
This surely isn't going in any good direction. What's next ads in commits?
I wonder how long before Microsoft starts pushing people using Github into MS ecosystem - MS logins, showing MS AI down user's throats, pushing actions towards "works on Azure, don't care about the rest", etc. ?
Everything is possible to be integrated to AI, AI expectation is so huge, even Google is try to implement AI into search engine. it's not much surprise that Github become the rock on the road for MS to AI.
This is common. Big company buys smaller company. Smaller company execs stay on and establish the idea of independence. Eventually smaller company execs move on and Big company fills the ranks with their employees. Nothing sinister. Just how it goes.
Well, that's my stage left... I had already brought my github usage to bare minimum... For any of my clients through my business, I'm suggesting they host their own gtt repo's and only using Github and Gitlab for the visibility, not as an actual service to house their shit
Like it or not, mergers/acquisitions are matters of money, not whether you like the product or not. In fact, all corporations are beholden to make the most money, not the best products. Frequently the product that makes the most money is the one that constantly nags you to give it more money, which everyone hates.
Today I watched the WHY2025 talk about what happened to XS4ALL (a Dutch hacker-ethic ISP). Here's the summary: "we sold our profitable smallish independent startup with anti-corporate culture to a big corporation for lots of money, because we thought they'd continue it being awesomely anti-corporate, but all they did was squeeze our customers for more money, lay off all our staff and then move the customers to the corporation's own brand. We fought them in the courts, but the courts decisively ruled they were allowed to do all that because they own us, and it turns out they'd got expensive lawyers who did all the paperwork and pulled the right strings to make us look like the bad guys." Like, no shit? What were you expecting to happen? Does this story sound familiar to you?
Everyone needs to realize "the scorpion and the frog" is about corporations. Anyway, there's nothing illegal about selling your soul for money. It's almost mandatory in fact.
> “GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon,” says Dohmke in a memo to GitHub employees today. “I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world.”
Is interesting to me. There is quite a number of rumors that MSFT will be Returning to Office next year. The prominence of 'remote first' in this quote may indicate that such concerns are playing a role here...
Interesting that they always focus more on AI while their product is less and less usable. I want a usable and efficient pull request page, not useless AI features. Seems like the priorities are all wrong. The enshittification of GitHub is absolutely dramatic.
On the one hand, this probably means it gets the funding it needs to keep going strong.
On the other hand, I'm worried that this means that GitHub is going to focus exclusively on building AI features while the core product becomes stale/abandoned.
Did GitHub have a funding problem? They doubled revenue last year, with 40% of that coming from GitHub Copilot. I imagine that for 2025, the increase will be much higher than even that.
I expect that the problem that Microsoft aims to fix is that people can use GitHub effortlessly without locking into Azure and Power Platform
I don't believe so, and I didn't mean to imply that. Rather just that if they are part of the "Core AI" org then they will likely remain a priority area of investment for Microsoft...right now anyway.
GitHub was such a cool product of its time, the complete epitome of ridiculous SV tech companies. The Oval Office. The whiskey library. A room full of swag. A product ubiquitously known by every nerd in the bay, then, world. I didn’t work there, but it was cool to be around it in SF at the time. Always sad to see them fall apart (yes yes I know it’s been happening for a long time)
IMO this was predictable and I recall walking a few people in the industry through the argument and suggesting they maintain a path to migrate off GitHub for when it finally gets re-orged.
Whenever someone makes a promise that a subsidiary or product will remain unchanged (typically because that's how customers/users prefer it), it's useful to ask whether that promise has any legal force that will prevent the company from reneging on the promise if organizational or market circumstances change.
There is almost never a barrier to having the organization change their mind, which means that the promise is at best a soft promise that in the near term they don't intend to change too much too quickly.
GitHub was getting more and more corrupt as Microsoft matured it. The worst were the fake stars and engagement from bots. Then Big Tech gatekeepers fast tracked your job application if they saw you had hundreds of stars (they didn't care if it was fake).
Maintaining "independence" after selling the company to MSFT has always been a facade. Even from the perspective of the users, there was this palpable difference between before and after MSFT acquisition
You really didn't see that coming at the moment they bought Github? That was their entire intent, to have full access to all of the greatest minds in software... Everyone should have bailed immediately after acquisition... If you don't control the servers that your code is on, it's no longer your code, at the very least, you're sharing with your hosting provider. But, everyone needs to hurry up and jump to market, instead of taking the time to build their own servers, custom development environment, etc. So, because everyone followed the herd, now everyone is lead slaughter... This was a collective choice made out of laziness, convenience, false sense of necessity, greed, etc... We have no to blame but ourselves, because it wouldn't have happen if we didn't choose it...
One tried-and-true classic is to delete old stuff, and GitHub has a lot of old stuff... in a couple years someone will calculate an amount they can save.
Sorry, is anyone even remotely surprised? This has and will always be Microsoft's modus operandi.
The bit most of us seem to completely misunderstand is that the name of the capitalist game is not competition it's monopoly rent. All major corporations time and again look to capture a monopoly, it's the winning play.
two years ago, I opened a PR asking for an LLM commit feature, and they flat-out said they weren’t doing it. Meanwhile, Cursor was eating their lunch and lapping them twice. I couldn’t believe how complacent and out-of-touch they were—it was pure laziness dressed up as “product focus.” And let’s not forget the ancient bugs rotting in their backlog that they refuse to fix. It’s like they actively don’t care about their users.
If you want to make a better version control service, then you might consider:
- Free public repositories and free API access.
- Mutual TLS authentication. Use X.509 extensions for partial delegation of authorization, so that someone can issue a certificate to themself or others with a limited set of permissions.
- Mirroring on multiple independent services.
- Allow SHA-1 (for compatibility with a lot of existing repositories that use it, and anyone using software that does not support other hashing algorithms) but also allow other more secure hashing algorithms to be used in case you do not want to use SHA-1.
- Make the HTML to work without CSS and JavaScripts (even if they can provide enhancements, do not make them required).
- Support some parts of the GitHub API, in order that existing software which uses GitHub API will be able to work with it.
- If you are making a new API as well, then it might use DER, that can use binary data, non-Unicode text data, etc better.
- Do not require TLS for read-only access to public data (but still allow using TLS even in this case).
I think that just like it happened with Apple after they made it out of bankruptcy, Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over.
Xamarin is no more, after the whole MAUI rewrite without backwards compatibility to Xamarin.Forms, killing VS4Mac, shortly after having rewriten the underlying Xamarin based IDE into Mac, what survives is a subset of Xamarin tech for mobile and WebAssembly workloads.
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
A proper cross platform IDE experience requires getting Rider.
Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Github even with the previous CEO was already a delivery mechanism for Azure and AI efforts, now it will be full steam ahead, as per new org chart.
VC++ after betting other compilers in C++20 support, seems to have lost its resources struggling to deliver C++23, and also probably affected by the Secure Future Initiative, and decisions for safer languages.
But hey 4 trillion valuation, so from shareholders point of view, everything is going great.
Microsoft being the cool guys? The cool guys? Mwuhahahhaa.
This gave me the good belly laugh I needed.
For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
- being the no. 1 enemy of free software
- shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share
- making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite
- creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM, etc.)
- making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The last time they might have been considered the "cool guys" was sometime in the 90s.
This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.
Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
133 replies →
These are the kind of claims that make some Linux users tiresome to talk to. (Full disclosure: I am also a Linux user).
I'm not defending Microsoft, they are not necessarily my cup of tea, but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).
Feel free to express your opinions, but don't be hateful!
32 replies →
> making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased
Their keyboards were arguably the best ones around. I'm literally typing this on a 20 year old MS keyboard right now.
7 replies →
> - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
I don't personally get too attached to devices I purchase or begrudge others for what they buy so, I'm curious what made them "cringe hardware" in your opinion. Adoption aside, they looked like pretty compelling devices to me. Is this a case of buying anything that isn't Apple isn't cool? Or is there something deeper there?
This "Microsoft are good guys" is a bizarre recurring comment that has appeared on HN for quite a while now
It's like pretending people must choose from Russia, North Korea, South Sudan or the Central African Republic
Who are the good guys
None of these companies are "good guys"
These "Leave Microsoft alone" HN comments will undoubtedly persist
Perhaps there are MS employees who comment on HN and they are sensitive about criticism
The idea Microsoft is somehow benign is truly hilarious
It is not difficult to argue the damage this company causes today without retribution is far worse than what they did in the past
IME, Microsoft is very cult-like; the employees believe that Microsoft has a solution for any problem, and there is never, ever any contemplation that the company creates problems ;this does not stop with the employees, it can extend to others who are "bought in" to the Redmond ecosystem
1 reply →
It's always better when companies are hungry for business. I thought that in 2016ish it was super cool for Microsoft to get into Linux, build VS Code, and make bets like the Surface Studio.
For comparison, I think Mac OS in 2008 was also at a bit of a golden age:
- You had native file support for .iso, .zip without needing to install crapware like Winzip.
- You even could preview *.psd files out the box.
- You had first-party apps like Image Capture to scan documents without needing to install extra software.
- There was an amazing third-party app ecosystem with things like Yojimbo, OnyX, Little Snitch, Quicksilver, Handbrake, Coda, Adium.
This was around the time of the "I'm a Mac" campaign when Apple was _hungry_ to win business away from Windows. All of these small, polished advantages made me fall in love with the experience.
OSX today is still good but there definitely isn't that same level of "underdog hunger" showing up in the products as of late.
Anyway I'm just trying to say companies being hungry for business shows up in its products and that's better for consumers.
>shipping the worst web browser in existence
Which? IE6? IE6 is the best web browser in existence though. You confuse standard with good.
Talk to some developers with 3-5yoe, they do see Microsoft as a cool company. For them it’s a company that created TypeScript, supports open source, runs NPM, created VSCode etc. None of them thinks of Internet Explorer, Zune, or anti competitive behavior. You will always associate MS with these failures, the generation after you won’t
Windows Phone was solid. Actual innovation in mobile UI.
Commercial success hasn’t been an argument for technical supremacy since Betamax.
> making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The 25 year window you picked actually coincides almost exactly with the time since the original X-Box was launched. Seems an odd omission from the list of hardware MS released in that time period.
Also the IntelliMouse Explorer was released in late 1999, which nobody who has ever had to clean the gunk off a mouseball roller would describe as ‘cringe’.
Zune was actually kinda nice - although I agree nobody bought it!
2 replies →
25 years? Try 40.
ActiveX plugins? MSJVM? Last 25 years? You might need to update your script.
Hey! I liked my Windows Phone. Original Xbox and the first half of Xbox 360 where also cool. End of list of good things however.
>For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
That was 10 years ago
eh, they had short blip in the relatively recent history, especially with developers, in mid 2010s.
With dotnet core 1-3 - open source cross platform .net, that was modern, fresh and clearly a project done by developers for developers. add vscode to this and it seems nice.
but as soon as 5 hit, if you look into details, they went to their usual bullshit, starting with stapling together winforms and wpf to it. the feel of the project shifted from 'developers for developers' to usual top down management.
vscode is also a weird case - it looks open source, but isn't at all(the builds you get aren't just from the same codebase + no access to extensions legally if you build your own, or fork it)
30 years, not 25. A lot of early contributions to Linux basically came with a "PS: Fuck Microsoft" at the bottom.
Much as it was all true and a lot of us were there, Microsoft moved on and so must open source. These aren't the Bobs anymore.
> - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The Surface looks cool to me, but since it runs Windows, I will never use it. Does it only look cool, or is actually a cool device?
10 replies →
> For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
That's true, but there is a catch in your wording. For the last 15 year, Microsoft has:
- Adopted open source/free software and gave contributions to various project (e.g. Linux in 2012 https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTEwNzE)
- Abandoned the worst web browser in existence. That they created :)
- Abandoned ActiveX (29 years ago), Silverlight (4 years ago)
+ Opened .NET to more platform than just Windows. It can now run very well on Linux, Mac, etc.
+ Made many of its locked down stuff open source - .NET, Z3, hell there was that few weeks ago open sourcing of the WinUI framework, etc.
+ Pivoted towards the cloud where OSS software synergizes with their cloud offerings.
Do they do corrupt deals with governments? Well yes, but so does every other big corp. And making cringe hardware isn't a crime in itself.
Do they still do a lot of shady shit? You bet, but they only started getting worse a few years ago. You are thinking it doesn't come in waves and it was all evil, all the time.
Can't they be forgiven? For taking the shit show JS was/is and turning it into magical TS?
While I mostly agree with your assessment, I feel like the Xbox is pretty cool.
7 replies →
Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
1 reply →
This is bullshit, the Zune was great and was doing incredibly well, at least around here.
It was THE device to have, people were going crazy for them; there was enough pent up demand that people were breaking windows and sliding into cars to get them.
I still miss that thing.
1 reply →
I don't know where you've been the last decade, but it's clear they have been perceived this way. Him describing that perception only to be ridiculed by you is a pretty low blow.
Microsoft is also LinkedIn, GitHub, Typescript, NPM (NPM! Where do you host your dependencies?), games and OpenAI.
I love how each sector they’re invested in is a practical monopoly.
1 reply →
I agree with you
And today they are even complicit in genocide and avid supporters of fascist USA dictator Trump, can hardly get less cool then that
3 replies →
Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies. Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best.
Microsoft is the Walmart of operating system providers, that happened to buy a popular Git hosting site and briefly made noises that seemed not awful.
In terms of coolness, Microsoft peaked right around the time they were hiring the cast of Friends to promote their OS.
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Wait, do they?
I mostly remember:
- A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
- Aimless products like the Vision Pro that seems to have failed as the "get the devs excited" premium SDK launch everyone described it as
- Rocky start issues on Apple Intelligence, nerfed Siri, etc.
- Unexciting iPhone launch and lots of ridicule levied on Liquid Glass
It's the laptop to get for compute/battery, which definitely is not nothing, but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
71 replies →
> Apple and Microsoft seem very different companies.
They are very different companies in very different businesses. Apple is a hardware company, Microsoft is a software company. That affects everything (and is why the two are not fundamentally competitors).
I don't think one has ever been better behaved than the other at all, though. The main difference is that for most of their time, Microsoft was just in a position where it could do more harm than Apple.
21 replies →
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Do they? I feel like this is a bimodal thing from what I've seen of other peoples opinions - they're either amazing and all you ever use, or they're the worst company ever.
As a developer I've always seen Macs as a necessary evil - they were the only polished "working out of the box" unix-like system you could buy for a long time but you had to put up with locked down software, comically bad pricing and cooling issues.
Now with the Mx stuff the hardware is amazing, and pretty fantastic value for money if you avoid the weird points in the price scale where they massively overcharge for RAM. But you still have to use their locked down software stack and ecosystem.
> Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best.
This love for Apple seems to be a very US-American thing.
1 reply →
Neither of them respect their users, and their major products are all black boxes that you're not allowed to change, inspect, understand, etc.
They're both the polar opposite of "tech friendly".
But I've yet to meet a person that said, "Oh, Rachel and Chandler from Friends... maybe Windows IS cool!". It wasn't cool, it wasn't anything. Apple was trendy with the designers and creative types, and Windows was what you probably used at your doldrums day job. The only place where MS has ever been "cool" is with gamers. I think your "Walmart" analogy is a perfect one.
1 reply →
> Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will
Good grief. Sometimes it's good to get a reminder that there are still people who think this way.
10 replies →
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Only among people who don't have to develop for the Apple ecosystem.
I used to think that way, and I’m not rushing to apply to Microsoft, but I do notice the various divisions, studios, stock price growth and comparable RSU packages that all make me totally forget about its antiquated branding and association
lol
[flagged]
2 replies →
You forgot to mention the gaming section.
Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
I guess generating hype by acquisition and increase valuation cause more profit than developing a real product.
I'm beginning to think that using Microsoft services(yes, GitHub included) is morally questionable behaviour right now. I can't support the current Microsoft behaviour of laying off many employees so casually.
> Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
FTFY, Microsoft is even killing studio with successful games, like Tango.
Yes, the whole XBox division has been a mess, especially after ABK.
However XBox plus Microsoft Gaming Studios, is still one of the biggest group of AAA publishers, they have a big enough slice of the market.
Hence why now they're dominating PlayStation charts with cross-platform games.
Many Microsoft haters don't have an good enough idea of how big they have become on games industry, regardless of layoffs and such.
SteamOS keeps being around until they feel like doing a netbooks like move, taking all their games out of Steam, or whatever else Microsoft might think of.
Hence why I regularly complain Valve should keep trying to bring developers to target GNU/Linux natively instead of translating Windows games.
3 replies →
Microsoft is acquiring a lot of game developers, put it on hold for a few years, then close subsidiary and layoff all employees.
Sounds like they just bought the IP.
1 reply →
I’m glad Gitlab is still an option, just sitting there waiting to absorb the market pivot if Microsoft takes it the wrong way.
I see more people jump for Codeberg these days.
20 replies →
Among enterprises I work with, I'm seeing way more migration to self-hosted Gitlab than I was a few years ago. Even among Azure-dependent orgs.
1 reply →
Gitlab is not really an option for me. Their pricing is absolutely out of this world.
Additionally there is Codeburg/Forgejo, and for the atproto-enjoyers, tangled.sh is a new face that feels like it could be good.
5 replies →
As a Deno user, this news also makes me see more value in JSR. (Relative to npm's ownership, that is.)
Left Gitlab after they changed the UI nearly every month, it's still very cumbersome to use.
Yes, as long as you don’t look at their pricing :/
https://www.opencode.net/
I can see Gitlab in the same position in the near future. Only a matter of time...
It's funny. Nobody complains that there is a lack of free multi-platform desktop GUI profiling tools for Go, Python, Ruby, Elixir etc. Somehow we just accept those languages are only for web services, web apps, and command-line utilities.
What is the problem with Microsoft keeping "nice to have" desktop GUI stuff for their own proprietary ecosystem when everything else has open sourced? Including the primitives needed for the community to build their own GUI and developer tooling stuff, just like JetBrains did with Rider.
> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only, and partially supported on VSCode, which also has the same VS license.
On HN I keep hearing that associating .NET with Windows is outdated perception.
Writing JVM languages I feel that the developer experience is pretty much the same on any OS. It seems this cannot be said for .NET?
If you're writing a server or a web app then its good and runs well.
Visual Studio is still not ported to Linux or Mac, you need to use Rider or VSCode. If you use JetBrains for Java, using Rider will feel good no matter where you are.
The GUI library situation is a tough one. In many ways its far more advanced than other languages but their newest attempt is not as good as the older Windows only API. But what other language is graded for its great native GUI library?
I'm not calling MS cool but at the same time I think the goalposts are different.
6 replies →
It can. DX is pretty much the same for backend and CLI stuff using VS Code on Mac, Linux and Windows. I'm working daily on C# backend and CLI stuff on a Mac (those are the dev machines at my employer). DX is on par with Go and Rust (at least dotnet CLI, LSP, Debugger, I can't speak for the profiler as I've never used it). I like the Rust tooling most, but dotnet CLI is not far behind.
Language and std lib wise, C# sits in the sweet spot.
Mh, I'm not the most experienced guy with .NET.
We have a few .NET applications running on the infrastructure on Linux hosts and it's just like every other thing.
But in some contexts, e.g. PowerBI, it pulls in a dependency and BOOM it's Windows Only to the point that not even Wine or Proton can help you. For something, that should be, mind you, a dumb SQL proxy like the PowerBI Embedded Gateway.
1 reply →
Pretty much no, it can't be said for .Net.
It currently supports Linux as a running target for servers. It supports both running desktop software and development very badly.
4 replies →
The server deploy experience for .NET is pretty much the same on Windows or Linux. The developer tooling experience has more options on Windows.
I love C# and .NET is amazing for some specific use cases like REST APIs but there's so much stuff that just doesn't work or needs a lot more effort to get somewhere.
MAUI is a mess.
Blazor will never work as a general solution for full stack web apps. Even if a small app didn't have to download like 10MB of WASM code the DX is terrible and performance just as bad. Elixir Phoenix developed with a fraction of the budget is just so far ahead.
C# hot reload has been broken for years. I doubt it will ever be as good as what you get in JS with Vite.
Minimal APIs are a great idea but 4 years later and still fundamental features like validation are missing (it's coming in .NET 10).
They've been investing a ton of effort into Aspire. It's cool but is it more important than core features?
And now with AI, Microsoft is more distracted than ever and I'm starting to regret getting into .NET at all.
Is MAUI now just a simple wrapper for Blazor projects?
.NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales - I think MSFT doesn't care just as they don't care about GUI workloads, because only thing they care now is having developers run their stuff on Azure. You don't need VS for those cloud .NET apps and you don't need front end frameworks like Forms, Xamarin or MAUI. Seems like C++ is also something they would not be interested investing into when they can get people into cloud easier with C#.
Why do people need to create anthropomorphising narratives around companies? Don't be any company's cheerleader, use the stuff that's best for you (and the environment)
I built my career on MSFT stack I am going to be their cheerleader, don't want them to go down or stagnate as I would have to switch stack.
I don't understand people who are just consumers and have no actual business to root for MSFT or AAPL or any other company.
Agreed, but apparently company cheerleadering never goes away.
1 reply →
Is he creating or is he relating what people think? I don't see this is him arguing so much as reporting.
Microsoft not being terrible was a zero interest rate phenomenon. The news today is a lot worse than just Github not being independent anymore. It sounds like literally the entire development division is being rolled into this "Core AI" business unit.
When Nadella announced plans to double the company's revenue by 2030, it was pretty clear that the enshitifiction was going to ramp up significantly, but it doesn't seem like it will ever relent now that they have to squeeze out more free cash flow to cover all of this AI capex. Windows is practically malware at this point, they've made extremely deep cuts to .NET engineering headcount, and it's just going to get worse.
fifteen years ago I predicted that if we ever have a bloody AI revolution, the most likely case would be that it would be Microsoft's fault because they are the kings of unintended consequences.
The second most likely case being some AI figuring out how to hack AWS to steal compute time, probably by getting access to billing information.
Microsoft seems to be slowly pulling ahead at the moment.
I think Jetbrians Rider and vscode being “good enough” to stop Microsoft investing in another IDE for Mac
> Microsoft being the cool guys phase is slowly over.
That happened three decades ago.
There was a new wind after Satya took over, but apparently it is slowly gone now.
5 replies →
I remember all the PR about Satya Nadella making the company cool, modern, user-friendly, and open source friendly. Thought wow, he must also be a hypnotist.
If Github/Copilot wins the war of coding assistant and becomes the next growth point in MS, the story will be total different.
We shouldn't ignore the influence of trend, it's like the facebook in mobile era.
No one wants cross platform.
I couldn't believe the number of people who were saying that "Microsoft are the good guys now" or "Microsoft loves open source now".
Microsoft stopped openly attacking open source at a time when open source was clearly winning:
- most servers were running linux
- most phones and tablets were running android
- people were buying tablets instead of desktops
- Google was openly promoting open source through GSOC
- large corporations were regularly releasing their tools as open source
Most importantly, developers openly hated Microsoft for holding the industry back (remember IE6?).
So they did what any good corporations does - they went along with the winning side.
And now they they have positive emotional connotations in devs' minds, or at least organizational buy-in again, they can do what corporations do best - making money by abusing their position with barely any competition.
---
The lesson here are: - Corporations should simply not have this amount of power. - Corporations are amoral, they don't have values, views or beliefs. They are systems designed for optimizing goals. You can never _trust_ a corporation - not because they are untrustworthy but because trust is a human-to-human level concept, it does not have any meaning in human-to-system interaction.
I think big corporations are not amoral, they are immoral. There is no wealth that has been built obeying morality or showing emphaty. Once them two become obstacles for profits, they will be thrown out.
1 reply →
This is an odd comment. Xamarin has never been relevant. GitHub is historically OSS focused. Xamarin was some weird niche product for Windows devs. Hardly any overlap with GitHub’s core audience. I don’t know what will happen next, but hodgepodge of weird MS tech isn’t the lens to view this through.
Didn't the Xamarin guy became the CEO of GitHub at one point?
2 replies →
Do you work in devdiv at Microsoft? I can see the org chart in this comment haha
No, but I code for Microsoft platforms since MS-DOS 3.3, so one gets to know how it all works, when having read so many docs, MSJ articles, MSDN, PDC and BUILD sessions, podcats and what not.
Wait Microsoft was cool at some point?
Yeah. Xbox, GitHub, Sataya's early days embracing open source, Zune (admittedly not cool but i loved the product).
Windows 7 was pretty cool, and XP was practically unbeatable despite its many many flaws.
8 replies →
Did you missed the whole Microsoft <3 FOSS, right after Satya took over?
7 replies →
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
Can you elaborate on why you believe that? I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework. I mean, their Win32 API is still alive and well, as well as MFC, ATL, etc. WPF still gets some minor updates too here and there.
I have no idea what you mean by web, too. ASP.NET is perhaps one of the better maintained web frameworks around. What exactly do you interptet as a concern?
Blazor is also Microsoft's alternative to JavaScript and it's main value proposition is being able to write webassembly apps using Microsoft technology exclusively. What do you think is replacing this?
Pointing out Aspire is even weirder. It's a containerization framework to help with observability and manage distributed applications. What exactly is the overlap?
I sense a great deal of confusion in your comments. What exactly are you trying to say?
> I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework.
WinUI3 is dead, lol. I tried to migrate from UWP to WinUI3, but it is literally dead. There doesn’t seem to be any team at MS actively working on it, the community calls have died, and the last build conf didn’t have any WinUI3 talks, all AI stuff. Yes, you can build apps with WinUI3, but development and support for it has stalled and I couldn’t justify moving the companies product over to WinUI3.
No they aren't placing all their chips on WinUI3, only those that never went through all reboots since Windows 8, believe that.
WPF got taken out of legacy mode at BUILD 2024, exactly because hardly anyone outside Redmond cares about WinUI 3.
Anyone that has been long enough around, has seen ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Core MVC (not compatible with MVC 5 predecessor), Razor Pages, Minimal APIs, Blazor,...
So it is a mess doing consulting and depending on what .NET version the customer team is allowed to use, and existing code, what gets to be used by that portfolio.
Minimal APIs have been designed to bring in Python and JavaScript developers into .NET, which many of us see as not working at all, while having created the need now everyone creates their own controllers infractruture, as means to tame having minimal APIs all over the place, there are even MVVM like frameworks now for that purpose.
Blazor is really only usable as path forward for those still stuck in WebForms, due to the similar approach to do Web UIs, and to .NET shops without frontend teams.
In the age of distributed computing with microservices and frontend teams, it is a hard sell to make them adopt Blazor and learn C#, instead of React, Angular, Vue.
At least they have adopted TypeScript, the next language that Anders Hejlsberg decided to focus on.
Aspire is something that has been pivoted, now they try to sell it as Microsoft's Pulumi, but everyone has to write the orchestration code in C#, thus only relevant to .NET shops.
Maddy Montaquila has said in a few .NET podcast interviews that they are trying to use Aspire as means to sell .NET to UNIX shops, given the low adoption numbers outside the traditional Microsoft shops, even after almost a decade being open source.
I’ve been in the industry for 30 years professionally and 10 years as hobbyist who paid as much attention to the industry as one could before the internet in the 80s early 90s including lying as a 9th grader pretending to be a big spender to get a free subscription to MacWeek and PCWeek.
At no point in time was Microsoft one of the cool guys.
They're releasing a feature on Windows which literally records your screen every few seconds!
These guys are extremely bad guys.
How is Rider v. VS?
This is the sort of question I don't trust AI with yet.
> How is Rider v. VS?
Rider is far better than VS for everything apart from Desktop UI Apps and perhaps Blazor WASM hot reloading, which is itself far behind the UX of JS/Vite hot reloading, so I avoid it and just use Blazor static rendering. Otherwise VS tooling is far behind Intellij/Rider for authoring Web dev assets, inc. TypeScript.
I switched to Rider/VS Code long before moving to Linux, which I'm happy to find works just as well in Linux. Not a fan of JetBrains built-in AI Integration (which IMO they've fumbled for years), but happy with Augment Code's Intellij Plugin which I use in both Rider and VS Code.
I have been a .NET dev for the past 8 years and have switched fully to Rider. The only thing I miss from VS is the quick nav to see all the properties and methods in a file on the top bar. Everything else is vastly better:
- Auto complete is a bit smarter (even the free AI suggestions are better) - Refactoring across files is often faster - Package management is undoubtedly the latest performance difference. I would go from taking 1-2 minutes from using VS's "Manage packages for solution" to under 10 seconds in Rider. - In VS there's always a noticeable delay when the debugger hits a breakpoint / exception and the IDE takes a few seconds to actually display. This is about halved in Rider. - The built in terminal is vastly better than VS's, though not as good as Windows Terminal
2 replies →
Rider is where I live for dev work.
If you do web work it's night and day compared to VS, it pretty much includes all WebStorm features in it as well.
VS - great if you are Windows only shop for dev and want all the bells and whistles
Rider - has all of the the nice things JetBrains does and the best option on Mac if you need advanced refactoring; UI feels a bit cluttered at time (though they improved this).
VSC - for whatever reason, I always end up back to VSC for .NET for backends. Good enough, fast, and lightweight enough. Plays nicely with Node and full-stack monorepos.
I would commit to VSC and try to make it work. If you find you need advanced refactoring support, then try out Rider.
Rider is very nice and a perfectly competent development environment. It gets first class support and often has the ability to test preview features from dotnet upcoming language and runtimes.
It's biggest problem is that it's not Visual Studio, so it is very hard for people who have lived in VS for a decade to move over.
It does away with some bloat and also provides some features of Resharper natively instead of as an extension.
You can quite literally use this as your primary development environment.
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
... what?
They could do a better job with the native frameworks, but the rest of these are completely unrelated. For web, MVC is pretty much dead and you might want to use Blazor SSR instead. Web API via controllers is still supported, but minimal API endpoints are the hot thing. Blazor is being treated as a first class product. Aspire is there to assist in local orchestration of distributed applications... and is built on Blazor.
Exactly that, now try to pick the best one of all of those on enterprise projects, depending on the version they are using, and there is no budget for updates.
first time I've ever read "Microsoft" and "cool" in the same sentence.
Technically not true. We were muttering "Not cool, Microsoft, not cool!" quite regularly back in the 90s and early 00s. :)
What about Wine? Is that still a thing?
Visual Studio Code seems to be their big open source push, besides GitHub. Everyone uses it, and most development environments and UX are based on it. Used to be Atom, I remember.
Pedantic, but VS Code does not share a lineage with Atom, besides the fact that it is built on Electron (which was, admittedly, originally built for Atom.)
4 replies →
I don't understand how VS Code is an "open source push". It's technically open source, but open source doesn't seem to be strategically important to it.
1 reply →
> Visual Studio Code ... open source
Pick one.
2 replies →
Heard of Apple Game Porting Toolkit? That's built on the back of Wine.
Microsoft has been open sourcing a bunch of their programs for a while now too. Majority are inconsequential but they are still nice to see. People on Linux OS's are excited about Microsoft calculator being open source but these open source projects still show that some people there have interest in the push.
Valve's steam deck runs on Linux/Wine. Wine is more popular than ever.
Wine, as part of Proton/SteamOS is a huge success.
Wine is still active, but I think mostly with Valve's proton, if that's the Wine you're talking about.
> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.
This is Microsoft's primary strategy. There are a lot of victims out there.
... he says after spending several months porting a win32 app to Silverlight as part of a Gold Partner/MS case study with much fanfare, only to have to spent the next few years backporting everything into the win32 app it never replaced, and then it was shit canned and only the win32 version remains.
We're planning to rewrite it in Qt at some point as some of our customers use RHEL.
I once worked for a company which outsourced the development of a Silverlight app for $1 million and then canned the whole thing one year later. It's just crazy how these life-changing amounts of money are thrown around like garbage in this industry.
1 reply →
No need to extinguish what you can infinitely embrace with capital and extend into a puzzle.
> .NET is now cross platform, but only as long as it doesn't hurt VS sales, with GUI workloads, profilers, still being mostly Windows only,
The monetisation of .NET is less about selling Windows licences, and more about selling Azure compute etc. The OS used on Azure is less relevant, you pay MS either way.
You can run .net without azure very easily. I personally have 4x web apps written in .net 8, razor. They used to be on a aws windows instance years ago but it was overly expensive for what I needed. Then I switched them to a small digital ocean server running ubuntu. When I started these apps I wrote them on windows 7 for windows server. I switched the server probably 2 years ago. I recently made the switch off of windows to ubuntu as my daily driver, instead of going to 11. Everything still works great. I do miss visual studio, but I am getting used to linux and its tools now. Point is, server is running and there is zero azure involved.
1 reply →
You really think Microsoft has been ”cool” for the past decade or so?
First the rampant spyware, then they gradually wreck every single piece of software into unusable buggy AI-slop-mess just to play the trashy MBA valuation games.
I still hold nostalgic value for the old OSes (say up to XP/7) but everything after has been nothing but maximal profit extraction.
Dont get me started on Azure
Not OP, but I do.
The '90s/00s era of people hating on M$ and picturing them as the Borg had left room to the 10s/20s of MS being "friendly" and releasing open source and free things (typescript, vs code, core.net, wsl, work on python etc) and not completely screwing up acquisitions like GitHub or Mojang.
Windows became adware, and office became some crappy online thing, but _microsoft_ had became nicer and gained goodwill.
This seems to have started evaporating in the last year or so.
4 replies →
Yeah that.
HN has a short memory. About 10 years ago everyone was all over Satya like he was Jesus' second coming.
Look where we are now.
Microsoft hasn't been the cool guys since at least 1995, and probably long before that.
Not just that, but Microsoft's reputation is in the process of taking a nose dive over its human rights record
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
Like IBM in the forties.
That's true of most of tech in general, these days. You have to pick your poison now.
1 reply →
Nobody even knows about this, no one thinks "Microsoft, hell no, they are a key player in the gaza conflict."
No one really associates human rights with Microsoft's reputation. That is the domain of Palantir, Meta, etc.
8 replies →
nothingburger
[flagged]
[flagged]
3 replies →
My deepest concern at this time isn't that AI eventually gets written down to nothing; because I don't think it will. Its that these companies are so scared of being out-competed by an AI-first competitor that they're willing to make deep sacrifices to their core businesses just to effectively virtue signal that they're AI first and unable to be out-competed.
It is deeply concerning because all things point to reality shaking out with irony. None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it. Apple has nothing, Microsoft wants to put spyware on every Windows computer and builds the worst coding agent on the market despite having privileged access to every line of source code ever written, Meta put a chatbot in Whatsapp then decided paying researchers ten mil would solve their problems, Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.
Their fear is going to lose them everything. Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed. Everyone learned that lesson and decided "we'll never be unwilling to innovate ever again"; but now their core product stable undergoes constant churn that is pissing off customers and driving competition to eat their lunch.
There is long-term, durable beauty in investing majority effort into making Github the single best place to host and organize code. That need is never going away. There is also necessity in ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world, no one doubts that, but its a matter of proportion and humility. Microsoft/Github will never build AI products that lead the market. Its not a technology problem; its an organizational and political one. But that's ok, because they could dominate the market with the world's best code hosting platform, an average AI strategy, and a library of integrations with the rest of the frontier world.
> Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive.
NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product.
YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.
I think folks sleep on Google around here. They are slow but they have so many compelling iterative AI usecases that even a BigTech org can manage it eventually.
Apple and Microsoft are rightly getting panned, Apple in particular is inexcusable (but I think they will have a unique offering when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for).
Google was the absolute king of AI (previously "ML") for at least 10 years of the last 20. They are also an absolute behemoth of tech and have consistently ranked among the most valuable companies in the world for multiple years, valued at trillions of dollars today. Hell, they're on version 7 and production year 10 of their custom AI ASIC family.
When considering the above, the amount of non-force-fed "modern AI" use they've been able to drive is supposed to be shown by things to the level of a question button on YouTube and some incremental overlaying of Gemini to Docs? What does that leave the companies without the decade head start, custom AI hardware, and trillions to spend to look to actually do worth a damn in their products with the tech?
I'm (cautiously) optimistic AI will have another round or two of fast gains again in the next 5 years. Without it I don't think it leaves the realm of niche/limited uses in products in that time frame. At least certainly not enough that building AI into your product is expected to make sense most of the time yet.
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
lol if this is the perfect example, "AI" in general is in a sad place. I've tried to use it a handful of times and each time it confidently produced wrong results in a way that derailed my quest for an answer. In my experience it's an anti-feature in that it seems to make things worse.
The best and latest Gemini Pro model is not SOTA. The only good things it has are the huge context and the low API price. But I had to stop using it because it kept contradicting itself in the walls of text it produces. (My paid account was forced to pay for AI with a price hike so I tried for a couple of months to see if I could make it work with prompt engineering, no luck).
Google researchers are great, but Engineering is dropping like a stone, and management is a complete disaster. Starting with their Indian McKinsey CEO moving core engineering teams to India.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core...
3 replies →
> when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for
What's that? It's not obvious to me, anyway.
7 replies →
If its really useful, how long do you think it will take Google to kill it ? ;-)
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
I remember when I was trying to find a YouTube video, I remembered the contents but not the name. I tried google search and existing LLMs including Gemini, and none could find it.
It would also be useful for security: give the AI a recording and ask when the suspicious person shows up, the item is stolen, the event happens, etc. But unfortunately also useful for tyranny…
The biggest counterexample would be that dead-ai-autotranslate-voice sucking every gram of joy out of watching your favourite creators, with no ability to turn it off.
Yeah to be clear, I think Google is the strongest in AI product development of the FAANG companies. I included them in the list because the most complaints I see about AI product integration among FANNG comes from Google products; the incessant bundling of Gemini chatboxes in every Workspace product.
> Apple in particular is inexcusable
This isn't me defending apple, but, let me play out a little scenario:
"hey siri, book me tickets to see tonight's game"
"sure thing, champ"
<<time passes>>
"I have booked the tickets, they are now in your apple wallet"
<<opens up wallet, sees that there is 1x £350 ticket to see "the game", a interactive lesson in pickup artistry>>
You buy apple because "it works" (yes, most of that is hype, but the vertical integration is actually good, not great for devs/tinkerers though.) AI just adds in a 10-30% chance of breaking what seems to be a simple workflow.
You don't notice with chatGPT, because you expect it to be the dipshit in your pocket. You don't expect apple to be shit. (although if you've tried to ask for a specific track whilst driving, you know how shit that is. )
I mean Microsoft hosts key AI models in their AI Foundry, I don't think they're hurting.
https://ai.azure.com/catalog
> YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product.
> Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example.
These are great examples of insulting and invasive introductions of LLMs into already functional workflows. These are anti-features.
2 replies →
What you're describing would seem to be a borderline miraculously positive thing. Every single generation of tech companies starts off absolutely amazing. Then they get big, and in surprisingly rapid order enter into the abyss from which they never return
But in modern times the particularly level level of big, scaling back of anti-competitive law enforcement, and a government increasingly obsessed with making [economic] number go up, regardless of the cost, have all created a situation where the current batch is dying a lot slower than they probably otherwise would.
If 'AI' is the pandora's box of self destruction that can move the show along to the next batch of companies, then it'll have been worth the trillions of dollars in investment after all!
I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle. When Standard Oil held a monopoly on the oil world, it was mostly possible because they were monopolizing a discrete set of natural resources. Tech isn't that: Especially with AI lowering the barrier of entry to learning and generating code, tech is extremely resource-unconstrained. The main resource we fight over is just humans who have the ability and desire to spend money.
I also don't feel it will happen in "rapid order". These companies are too big. Its happening business-unit by business-unit. In the far future, these companies will still exist, just heavily optimized into the much smaller handful of units that still generate profit.
1 reply →
intel.com's <title> says "Simplify Your AI Journey - Intel". Their description meta tag says "Deliver AI at scale across cloud, data center, edge, and client with comprehensive hardware and software solutions." Their frontpage mentions "AI" 9 times, but has only 3 mentions of "processor" and zero of "CPU".
I know they make processors, but they sure don't make it seem that way.
They realized they can't compete on processors, so they're moving on to greener pastures. Like kodak back then.
1 reply →
Yes, I find it greatly satisfying that these mega companies are turning away their most important asset: super qualified people capable of creating new products. They're basically betting on their own extinction.
> Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed.
Is it though? There's a reason why Microsoft's JVM competitor is called ".NET". They were planning Windows .NET Server 2003, Office.NET, etc.
I don't think an inversion of the hype cycle, it's just another hype cycle exactly. I think, in fact, it's extremely comparable. I remember people joking about Pets.com -- just imagine buying your pet food online?!? Crazy stuff. AI is the same. It's hyped up massively, there will eventually be some kind of correction, and then it'll become the new normal.
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective.
Not true. Ironically, the first exception I can think of is Github Copilot.
It is true these companies haven’t recouped anywhere near the $trillion they’ve invested in AI.
Only a sentence later do I explicitly reference Github Copilot; yet they belong on the list because despite having every advantage a company could have, the resources of a megacorporation, all the source code in the world, the semi-independence of a smaller team; they still managed to produce a mediocre and uninteresting product.
But, again: I think that state for Copilot is totally fine for Github. That product state of "its there, its builtin, and its fine" is a fantastic and extremely efficient market to service.
> There is also necessity in ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world,
I find it necessary to ask AI what that sentence even means.
> Apple has nothing
I always hear this but people use Siri all the time, and I think outside of talking to programmers, a lot of consumers probably consider that the level of AI they care about using. "is Siri really AI" seems like a real "is a hotdog a sandwich" question. Who cares? People eat hot dogs and talk to Siri.
It seems what Apple has less of is LLM products that cost enormous sums of money to make that people don't like using. Sure, they have a little of it, they fell flat on their faces with their news summaries thing last year and AppleVision was a nothingburger, but when it comes to "sinking huge amounts of money into deeply unpopular ventures", it seems to me that Apple's reluctance to deploy its largess here might be prudent. It seems like they're less exposed on the hype.
I do wish Siri was a little more intelligent to be honest.
I use Siri when I need a fast, distraction-free, action. Which makes it perfect when driving or performing other tasks where my hands a busy and/or I cannot put my attention on my phones LCD screen.
The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction.
I'd love it if Siri was smart enough to differentiate between:
- an automation request. eg setting an alarm or ringing a contact. The kind of interaction what you wouldn't want to offload to a 3rd party but is the kind of interaction where you don't need vast datastores of training.
- and an open-ended question. eg What time are Oasis playing in London tonight? Who was the 23rd President of Germany? What are the rules of Dodgeball? these sort of things are less confidential and don't require handing control of your phone to a 3rd party.
And I'd love it if Siri automatically offloaded from their local AI to ChatGPT (or whatever) when the latter was identified. That should be opt in, but when opted in, it should be automatic. I shouldn't have to consent each time after I've opted in.
1 reply →
I'm not sure if you're in a country that has already received some upgrade, but over here in Europe Siri is seen as a funny tamagochi that sometimes misunderstands and thinks its needed and is then quickly told to shut up.
I think the last time I talked to anyone about siri we were wondering why it was still so bad, now that we have LLMs.
1 reply →
Do I have any fellow Duolingo users here?
I know they've gotten shit for years, it's not gonna make you fluent, etc etc
But I've defended them because it's at the very least a good starting point and something to keep you consistent every day. As long as you're trying to be mindful about learning, I've found it to be a great tool to assist in improving my Spanish.
That is until a month or 2 ago where they completely overhauled their curriculum with AI slop. The stories are bland at best and confusing at first, the questions are brain-dead simple, it'll have sentences and questions that I've confirmed with native speakers are confusing/incorrect, it's riddled with mistakes, and somehow they even broke the TTS so it'll pronounce things wrong. One of the character voices consistently can't say a couple of letters, like it pronounces all the 'd's with 'v's or something. I can't believe they actually shipped it in this state, they completely broke it overnight. At this rate if it's not fixed by the time my annual subscription is up to renew, I will be cancelling.
It's absolutely the worst AI slopification of any product I use, and the CEO and everyone who pushed to ship it needs to be fired.
Yes I've been chronicling the enshittification of Duolingo here for several years (below). But unlike Github/CoreAI, DuoLingo is tied to a single (and imperilled) revenue-stream from a single product, plus they had a 7/2021 IPO in the heady days of Covid, so they started out in a subscriber market awash with cash. Also like other sites with a formerly vibrant community and forums, they rug-pulled the way they extracted value from the user community's posts then copyright-washed it through AI, then turned around and tried to remarket it back to said users ('Duolingo Max = Super Duolingo + features like AI-powered "Explain My Answer" and "Roleplay" options for more advanced practice'). While laying off thousands of their contractors and translators.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35679783
going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me.
Clozemaster is much more rudimentary but I do like how they use AI - there's a single button that gives you an AI grammatical summary of the translation and calls out any idioms or grammatical conventions in the target language compared to your native one.
Bought the lifetime license but it's free to use, you just get a limited amount of flash cards a day. If you wait until christmas there's generally a big discount on the lifetime license.
1 reply →
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective
The coding agents, CC, Cursor, etc. are quite good and useful.
I explicitly said "big tech companies"; that's FAANG, which does not include OpenAI, Anthropic, Anysphere, or their kin.
2 replies →
Yes yes, big corpos bad, startups good, I hecking love my Cursor agent.
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it.
Oh my God, tell me about it. Our C levels are being fed bullshit by all of our vendors about how AI is going to transform their business. Every few weeks I have to ask "what the fuck does that mean exactly?" "Oh, well, agentic AI and workflows blah blah."
Ok? You want a chatbot? Fine, we're still building a state machine. At best, the LLM is doing expensive NLP to classify the choices.
Something something classify support tickets? Alright, but we're still just doing keyword search, LLMs literally aren't even needed.
I love LLMs and get a lot of use out of them for coding, but I still don't see anywhere that they're going to fit in for core business functions. Anything that is proposed can and should be done without LLMs. I'm just not seeing where they can be useful until they are truly AGI. Until then, it's just expensive NLP.
It's very funny that for pretty much any use case of LLMs, they're either too expensive or too incapable or both! There may be a few uses that make sense, but it seems to be incredibly hard to find the balance.
4 replies →
The difference is that I can’t sell elasticsearch in my company, but I can sell an LLM.
Yeah, don’t ask..
2 replies →
I think there's a lot of really interesting (and profitable) AI products out there. And: there's so many more that can be built. We're only scratching the surface of what the industry has already invented can do. Not in an "AGI Inevitable" capacity; what we have, today, with more context engineering, better user interfaces, better products with deeper AI-first thinking, etc.
My point was more-so that FAANG isn't even scratching the surface; they're punching it bloody with their fists while yelling "look at all this AI we have, see dad we can't be disrupted we're the disrupters we're the disrupters".
It reminds me a lot of Xbox over the past six years, so much so that I think Xbox is a canary for how many business units in these companies will look in five more years.
1 reply →
I've been in a three different scenarios where I worked for independent companies under the umbrella of a large parent organization. In all 3, the leadership left or was fired, and the remainder of the company was merged into a division of the parent company.
The product quality went to shit in all 3 scenarios. There were different reasons and nuances to them all, but all 3 boiled down to one common factor. Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
They all turned into political battles at the leadership level, low morale at the product level, and decent jobs for the engineers as long as they were happy just doing what they were told. For the customers, everything just stagnated. It took years before all the politics sorted themselves out, people chose whether to stay or go, and you got product leadership running who could balance it all out without the baggage of the merger.
So as a Github customer, this does not have me running for the hills. We won't lose functionality. But we won't gain anything we truly desire either - we'll see new features come out that relate to Microsoft's dreams, not our own. At a strategic level, I'd start telling my teams to be sure not to get vendor-locked to any Github features, and always have a migration plan at least conceptualized so that once we see where it all really goes, we are well prepared to either stay or go depending on exactly what Microsoft does in the next couple years.
> Instead of following the desires of the customers, they now had to pigeon-hole those desires into the larger business goals of the parent organization.
GitHub has been ignoring customers' desire for IPv6 support for years[0], whereas Microsoft got IPv6 running on Windows NT 4.0 in 1998[1], so there might be a silver lining here.
[0] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539 [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ipv6-essentials/0596001...
Don't hold your breath for that, Azure still has spotty IPv6 support
From a product POV, GitHub seems like a solved problem. It's been working well-enough with the current feature set for over a decade, with many companies building themselves on top of its stack. If they stagnate in MS bureaucracy but keep the lights on for push/pull/PRs, that's probably good enough for most people until something completely changes how software is made.
The problem is that someone still has to polish their resume when working for GitHub (aka resume-driven development), so, they're actually making GitHub worse now:
Why is GitHub UI getting slower? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861 - Aug 2025 (113 comments)
Dear GitHub wasn't all that long ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904671
I think GitHub also doesn't have the same vendor lock-in that other companies do. I am very happy with their service, and I wouldn't want to move off of it. But at the same time there are numerous alternatives and it wouldn't be that hard to switch. Because, as you say, it is pretty much a solved problem, and because of that there are several competitors with feature parity at this point.
1 reply →
Yeah, this is sensible.
I also want to add that there are large industries that LOVE Microsoft and LOVE the Azure/365 vendor lock-in. This corporate merger might be added value to those customers. (Azure has their own github called Azure DevOps and - from what I have seen - is quite bad, but deeply integrated into Azure stuff)
ADO is just the rebranded Visual Studio Team Services which is just the rebranded Team Foundation Service (which itself is the cloud version of ADO/VST/TF Server). It isn't really integrated in Azure aside from the naming, and it is intended to be more of a Jira/Bitbucket/etc replacement than GitHub.
1 reply →
Azure DevOps is.... okay. It's functional, and it's not really anything unique or innovative; but it never really strived to be anything like that. It started out as the online, service-based version of Team Foundation Server and was very clearly being cultivated into turning into "Github, but integrated into the Azure ecosystem" and that particular strategic need evaporated for Microsoft when they acquired the actual Github.
Azure DevOps went into zombie mode basically the same day the acquisition closed; I don't think it's received any new features since 2018.
I've heard this story so many times.
1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.). 2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work. 3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed.
How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.
I completely agree with you.
The best answer I can give myself to your (perhaps rhetorical) question is twofold: - tech companies, for whatever reason, seem to need millions and millions of funding upfront to get started. Despite a tech company not needing essentially any asset (besides a few workstations and internet connections?). The VC era inherently created a huge distortion so that it's virtually impossible to start something without selling your soul to those who want you to be exactly like the others. You will be laughed out of the door from banks if you try to get some credit. Since the tech economy has been essentially a proxy for financial speculation, building a sustainable business that doesn't aim solely to IPO and "growth" is an idea that won't get any money to anybody. All of this to say, if workers today want to fund a co-op, as I want to, they need to wait until they have enough money saved to bootstrap it themselves. - until now, and for maybe a while longer, the job market for tech workers has been fairly comfortable, with perks and high wages. Things are clearly changing, as the streak of layoffs post-2021 shows. For a sector with low unionization and with the extreme pressure from companies to reduce workers power, I think in the next 5-10 years tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs. Once that will be the case, the incentive to do effectively a bullshit job in a big(ger) org - which many of us do, building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value - will not be there anymore, and I want to hope more people will choose alternative paths like co-ops and to develop products with different goals.
>How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?
Funny you should ask this. A co-worker was unironically glazing monarchies and suggested some books to me when we were drinking at dinner Friday. I was disgusted, tbh. But do not underestimate the desire of people to be ruled and told how to think and act.
1 reply →
I've seen enough: as the recognised authority and designated responsible person ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525256 I'm officially recognising this as the final end of 2010s Cool Microsoft.
> 74 points by leoc on April 3, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler
> Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad old ways).
Historical debate may now begin.
GitHub will now fall under Microsoft's CoreAI team, which give some indication of GitHub's purpose and direction going forward.
You mean all of Microsoft's direction? Look at how VSCode changelogs have morphed from editing features to 90% AI.
Thank you, this does not get discussed enough on HN. I used to look forward to monthly releases of VSCode and actually read the changelog carefully to see what new features/enhancements I could make use of. These days I just glance and ignore it completely -- almost everything is Copilot, MCP blahblah. Such a disappointment.
You would think with all the AI magic, they would deliver more "core editor" features/enhancement. No, just more Copilot.
2 replies →
Awesome, this is creating an opportunity for a new text editor. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
6 replies →
I can confidently predict that the breakout dev tool in the next few years will have LLM features, but won’t have forgotten stuff like editing features. As Claude Code has already demonstrated, you do t even need an editor for good LLM integration.
1 reply →
Some more indication:
> “Just like how Bill [Gates] had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of software developers building a bunch of software, I want our platform, for any enterprise or any organization, to be able to be the thing they turn into their own agent factory,” said Parikh [the CoreAI team lead].
That Bill Gates analogy seems rather far-fetched, though.
Had to read that sentence a couple of times -- what does it even mean? It's possible Verge may have butchered it
3 replies →
That sounds horrible. Who wants that??
2 replies →
And the prompt engineers running the agents will be sitting in Bangalore. Or perhaps outsourced to Infosys.
Microsoft under Gates at least produced real things. I wonder when Apple gets an Indian CEO to facilitate outsourcing.
2 replies →
evidence of severely advanced brain rot
Let's think about MicroSoft back in the 90s. There are no agent factories, whatever they are, but non-programmers are using Visual Basic, Excel, and Access to write their own software. Maybe throw in some ASP as well. (What if ClippyGPT had been available back in the day?) So thinking about that, if you ignore the buzzwords and squint, it kind of looks familiar.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with GitHub. Will they ~~agentify~~ enshittify Visual Source Safe as well?
right ... wtf
We could barely convince the reviewers on the last review that using GitHub is okay as long as we take some extra steps, I guess we should prepare to switch to a different platform with the next review.
reviewers?
11 replies →
They were already under CoreAI team. The verge has amended the article with a footnote correction to note that.
This is kinda pretty ridiculous.
Isn't GitHub's entire visibility and pervasiveness is entirely due to the OSS?
So, now they're basically saying to OSS, "so long, and thanks for all the fish"?
it seems like anyone continuing to use github is ok with providing free labor to Microsoft. Not that that wasn't the case already, but now it seems especially blatant. "open source" is just corporate welfare at this point.
Github as a platform itself though, isn't open source.
The industry has collectively decided that AI is the future of all of software development, so this move shouldn't be a surprise.
I just switched from Github to Gitlab. For anyone who is interested in doing the same, but doubtful because of the effort required: Gitlab has a pretty good migration tool. You authenticate against your github account and gitlab will import all your repos for you. We've been using gitlab at work for a bit and the CI/CD took a little getting used to but I'm overall happy with Gitlab.
Some people think a github presence is important for their personal portfolios/careers, but I've personally never seen any evidence that a recruiter or anyone has ever actually looked at my github profile. Plus I can just put gitlab on there instead now
I have worked for companies using GitLab and I really liked it. I need to have just about a dozen of my repos that kind of have to be on GitHub because of integrations with third parties, but most would live fine on GitLab.
EDIT: just looked, GitLab seems caught up in AI agent hype also, and have their prices gone up?
It's not that simple; their CI workflow architectures are completely different. The way projects and permissions work are completely different. The entire way GitLab organizes the taxonomy is different.
Gitlab seems to also be going into the "AI slop" direction, unfortunately, while core CI/CD features get sidelined...
Forgejo/Codeberg seems interesting
When all public code including GPL and AGPL has been stolen and plagiarized already and the fabled artificial intelligence is nowhere to be seen, stealing all the private and proprietary code will surely make all the difference.
It probably won't but reselling the code to its owners is still good business. Convince people that statistical models of copyrighted work (which can reproduce said copyrighted work both verbatim or disguised) are A"I" and sadly, somehow, most people seem OK with it.
Commoditize your complement.
Am I the only one who found Dohmke’s communication style to be… buzzword forward? For a company whose roots were in pragmatic engineering, I always felt that there was a too-heavy component of hype, particularly around AI, in pretty much every recent public announcement. Yet, despite all the rhetoric and GitHub’s superior position in the industry, they failed to capture the current AI editor market.
Structurally, it seems to make sense for GitHub to be part of Microsoft proper.
Perhaps this is a change for the better.
(PS: despite their “failure” to win hearts and minds, I do recommend giving Copilot in VSCode another look these days. Its agentic mode is very good and rapidly improving; I find it comparable to Claude Code at this point, particularly when paired with a strong model. Related to structure: I never quite understood the line between what parts of this GitHub made, and what parts of this the vscode and related Microsoft teams made.)
Not disregarding all the success MS has had under Nadella but his comms style is also extremely buzzword forward, so there was probably a _synergy_ there
CEOs of large companies are incapable of talking frankly. It is their purpose not to and how they reached their position.
Copilot in vscode is shit. The diffs are hilariously slow. It’s like a tech demo from 2 years ago.
Not too surprising considering how big a lead Github had in the generative coding space and how it managed to give it all up to a half dozen different companies over the last few years. An executive shakeup was long overdue.
For Microsoft it probably makes a lot of sense. For me as a Github user, I don't need "generative coding space" from github at all. That's not what I have been using it for for many years, and that's not what I want to use it for. I mean, Copilot is nice and useful but has preciously little to do with Github per se - if it didn't mention "Github" in the name, I'd see no relationship between the two at all. Code generation belongs in the IDE, Github is not an IDE - Github is what happens before and after the IDE, and keeping it separate works just fine. I'm afraid though Microsoft would try to push them together, and the result would be much worse than the starting point.
Heres the thing: it was a dev company with a side-AI business, but now Microsoft has signaled it wants an AI-GitHub with a dev-side business.
The features that will be prioritized will be AI not Git improvement
Are there any improvements to be done to Git? It seems like kind of a solved problem, like word processors or spreadsheets… most “improvements” to those are diminishing returns.
I don't mean to sounds like an MS apologist, btw. I fully predicted and hoped for an exodus from Github to GitLab or something back when it got acquired — I'm from the Microsux generation.
31 replies →
It's murky what Github's priorities going forward as part of CoreAI will be, and whether it will become even more of a subliminal marketing machine/ content source for AI codegen...
GitHub has (only) $2bn direct revenues (2024; subscriptions + presumably per-usage billing of features like GitHub Actions) but also generates revenue via Copilot, Marketplace (selling tools and integrations).
What are Microsoft CoreAI's revenues? surely >> GH's direct revenues. Hence, GH is likely to become a platform for pushing all sorts of AI revenue streams on its users. I wonder how Microsoft sees that, by segment.
Unsurprising but its a terrible move.
Github at its core is a software lifecycle management product. To keep it running requires skillsets that are much much different from that of Gen AI/ML/whatever. Its hard for me to see this as anything other than an intra corporate political play and not something thats in the best interests of the users or the community. I expect to see a lot of the “legacy Github” folks slowly leave and be replaced by MS/Azure folks (gross). In the short to medium term this is probably gonna affect the stability of the system (its already pretty bad with several outages every month, including silent outages).
> Its hard for me to see this as anything other than an intra corporate political play and not something thats in the best interests of the users or the community.
It's hard for me to see anything Microsoft does as something other than an intra-corporate political play.
I've always used self-hosted https://scm-manager.org for personal stuff and never felt any need to move to anything else. It is a surprisingly good and for some reason not very popular, piece of software.
Forgejo is a really great self-hosted alternative to GitHub.
If you've wondered about hosting your own version of GitHub but have worried it's too hard to set up, I'd encourage you to spend even a few minutes spinning an instance up with Docker Compose and poking around.
https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/admin/installation/docker/
GitLab is like, really good. No need to put your codebase in the "cloud."
GitLab is great - but super fat. The performance will suffer heavily if you don't give it the resources it wants (all RAM you can find, lol).
If you only need Git plus project tracking Gitea is super mature. It runs happily on small VPS.
I prefer Forgejo, but both it and Gitea support actions like GitHub's. You can have a nice CI/CD pipeline that runs 100% in-house, for free. I adore it for personal projects.
6 replies →
Gitea is neat, and the Actions compatibility is promising. Though I’d suggest a fork, Forgejo: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/
5 replies →
I bounced away from Gitea because they don't (last time I checked) have OIDC. I started[0] trying to revive-and-drive a previous PR[1] to add it, but the test failures are beyond my motivation to investigate and resolve.
[0] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/33945
[1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/25664
1 reply →
Gitea's UI is ugly.
While GitHub and GitLab have dedicated design and front-end teams to improve their UI/UX, Gitea and Forgejo aren't large enough to reach that scale, even after Gitea became a company.
For example, look at the number of issues triaged with "UX" [0] or "UX Paper Cut" [1] on GitLab. It is an order of magnitude larger than you would find in any other FOSS option.
[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/?label_name%5B...
[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/?label_name%5B...
1 reply →
In my experience, the "really good" is that it comes batteries included:
- completely docker based CI/CD which makes reasoning about what it's going to do easier than "read through some minified .js from some rando"
- they do have composable CI/CD akin to the GitHub Actions marketplace, but I haven't used it as much in anger to speak to how valuable it is versus "competitive checkbox feature"
- built-in Terraform State, so no more S3 + Dynamo
- highly configurable JWT claim curation for ease of OIDC based access from the pipelines
- good integration between the platform and multiple Kubernetes clusters
- related to that, a strong "review environment" setup
- they were also hinting at being a Sentry replacement, but regrettably I had to switch back to GitHub before that came out of preview so I don't this second know where it stands
GitLab doesn't have an equivalent of GitHub actions (except an alpha-quality prototype).
GitHub Actions can share runtime environment, which makes them cheap to compose. GitLab components are separately launched Docker containers, which makes them heavyweight and unsuitable for small things (e.g. a CI component can't install a dependency or set configuration for your build, because your build won't be running there).
The components aren't even actual components. They're just YAML templates concatenated with other YAML that appends lines to a bash script. This means you can't write smart integrations that refer to things like "the output path of the Build component", because there's no such entity. It's just some bash with some env var.
I can map most of the list but I can't recall what would be the "review environment setup" What did you mean by that?
1 reply →
“Really good” under which metric? Because it is slow, even more confusing after the terrible sidebar redesign and, to quote a famous author, its usage does not spark any joy.
Codeberg and gitea, on the other hand, feel great, like early Github. Fast and simple, instead of a product that’s adding feature on top of half-baked feature to capture the sweet corporate $$$.
Really good if you go by a feature checklist, probably. A bloated clutter of more or less working features, checking enterprise boxes.
1 reply →
I feel like all new AI tools only integrate with GitHub though, like Claude Code. We're actually thinking of moving from GitLab to GitHub, just for this reason.
In some industries, all the tools you actually need (say, MISRA checking) all work with GitLab out of the box.
same reason why we didn't leave github yet
most SaaS tools only have github integration which is sucks
Claude works great with forgejo/gitea. It's all just git, after all.
It's... ok. But many of the really useful features are paid. E.g. merge trains or mandatory reviews.
I also don't think "it's open source!" is a huge differentiator because it's enormous, difficult to deploy from source and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero.
I think Forgejo is probably a way better option at this point even if it is less mature. It's written in Go so way easier to deploy and edit. And none of the features are paid.
I do like Gitlab but... it's not amazing. I liked Phabricator more (except for its lack of integrated CI).
> written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero
That's a silly thing to say.
5 replies →
Every place I write code I use whatever GitHub like thing the admin installed. They all work well enough.
At home I prefer fossil. It isn’t without rough edges but for the small developer headcount stuff I do it is quite lovely.
I'll plug another option Gitpatch, however it's pretty early beta and not open-source yet, but most likely will be under AGPL at some point. It has built-in patch stacks (aka stacked PRs) and probably faster than any other Git host out there. disclosure: I'm the author.
GitLab has a ton of options, And I find myself a bit overwhelmed by the user interface. It really needs a UX lead to simplify and create a better information architecture.
For a couple grand a year, not having to worry about upgrades, backups, hosting cost, etc. is 100% worth it.
It is rumored that Gitlab is about to be aquired. It may not still be open-source after that.
I went there last year due to Microsoft's destruction of github.
And, if you don't like something there's a very good chance you could be the change you want to see - they have a pretty welcoming contribution culture. Even if you don't want to change something, being able to read the source for it goes a long way toward aligning your understanding of the behavior, and that's not a diss on their usually pretty good documentation
GitLab is wonderful but none of the AI tooling supports it and it's expensive.
none of the AI tooling supports it
i consider that a feature
> No need to put your codebase in the "cloud."
Yes and no. If all you want is a remote git server then no, there's not. But there's plenty of legitimate reasons to use a SaaS tool like GitHub.
Gitlab is like the SAP of git, something for bloated big corporations. I've never seen a single FOSS repo there.
Yeah, who's ever heard of this weird company named nvidia <https://gitlab.com/nvidia>, or inkscape <https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape>, or F-Droid <https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient>
2 replies →
The entire KDE ecosystem is on gitlab
https://community.kde.org/Infrastructure/GitLab
I don't care much for gitlab either, but for example inkscape lives there
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape
Didn't nobody ever tell you to "never say never" ?
Knot DNS[1] good enough for you ? GPL licensed.
[1] https://gitlab.nic.cz/knot/knot-dns
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/ - Freedesktop which is the org for many projects such as Wayland uses gitlab
https://gitlab.gnome.org/ - GNOME uses Gitlab
https://gitlab.com/kicad/ - KiCad uses Gitlab
1 reply →
It seems somewhat popular for developers who want to avoid github. Gnome and KiCAD also use it.
This was inevitable and going towards the direction, but it is sad to see this part of CoreAI division. Copilot and other AI initiatives should not be the primary driver of GitHub's vision.
Github may have more value as the largest software training corpus in the world than as a paid VCS, and Microsoft gets to uniquely utilize that as they will have non rate limited internal APIs and/or dumps to train on.
I assume they already had those APIs - Github was already owned by Microsoft. By prioritizing AI feature over the core experience it's possible that Github stops being the largest software training corpus in the future.
1 reply →
This -- Github's future is as a training source for Microsoft's AI products, and as a honeypot for collecting more training data.
You're looking at it from a developer's POV. Your goals are a quality product that helps you with your work.
Microsoft's goal is to make money by making software or ~~selling~~ renting services. You are a cost center.
And what do managers do to cost centers? They outsource them, either to artificial "intelligence" or actual Indians.
By plagiarizing stolen code, disregarding its original license, they hope to make the former actually work.
The resignation tells it was not independent for quite sometimes.
Besides, M&A means the acquirer OWNS the sold entity the independent. No independent whatsoever can take place when a company is owned by others.
The CoreAI team is where DevDiv got reorged into earlier this year: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342793/microsoft-ai-eng...
DevDiv was arguably the place where GitHub would have ended up had it become integrated earlier, so it makes sense that it would end up there.
It's not hard to imagine an alternative universe where Github is a steward of innovation for both git and the code review process; alas, this is not the world we live in.
Falling for the "Embrace" part again...
Lots of comments here remind me of the time GitHub was purchased by Microsoft. It would be the dead of GitHub. While in fact it got better: GitHub Actions (pretty neat CI system) happend under Microsoft. Free private repos happend under Microsoft.
Now this time it could be different. But last time wasn't that bad imho.
Microsoft made the GitHub UI significantly worse by rewriting everything in React. It's now slow and bloated. Copying text from the file viewer is a nightmare. And never ever look at how GitHub Actions work under the hood, you will wish you never became a developer.
Gitlab had their CI/CD a few years earlier, Github had no other option. As to which one feels more productive, that's up to personal tastes, for me Gitlab's option seems far more polished.
Github Actions was announced in OCT 2018, the acquisition deal close was announced a few days later.
Has there been any reports whether GitHub actually makes any money?
I feel like it doesn't matter at this point as long as MS valuation goes up it's all worth the costs. We're living in the VC economy :D
Github is the trainingmaterial for AI. It's a resource, not a product to make money with.
1 reply →
Microsoft doesn't disclose much but there were headlines in 2022 saying they were now at $1B annual recurring revenue.
Now with copilot I'd be surprised if they weren't profitable
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, etc, etc.
It did not entirely get better; some things may have improved and some things may have been made worse.
Private repositories is not a feature I use (if I want the files to be private, I will not send them to Microsoft or to someone else, unless they are the intended recipient).
I use GitHub Actions to automatically assign issues to myself,
I think they have changed the HTML in many worse ways; some functions require JavaScripts, etc. They also made mandatory 2FA, and setting it up does not work properly. (I can use the API to get around both issues, for now.)
I'm starting to really detest the AI-everywhere thing. You're starting to feel it absolutely everywhere - good products turning shit just to capitalize on the hype.
It sure is going to be painful migrating everything off github as the bit rot slowly seeps in. The eternal frustration of dead links, the constant astroturfing of LLM generated malware pretending to be what you're looking for, hoping to stumble across a fork in a random user's account.
Related ongoing thread:
Auf Wiedersehen, GitHub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864929 - Aug 2025 (66 comments)
I made the decision a few months back to go all in on self-hosting, and my own infrastructure. At least once a week I run into something that makes me realize I made the right decision. It's that time of the week again.
What are you using for git repos?
Forgejo
I moved to GitLab a year or so ago. It’s been great, I actually prefer GitLab ci
I did as well! No issues any worse than people using habitually using "github" to mean "the remote git repository in the cloud".
I expect this will continue indefinitely until the product becomes little more than an AI training corpus and genericized trademark, similar to how our Xerox machines at work are actually made by Brother, while Xerox the actual brand has faded into obsolescence.
I will note that we don't use many of the CI/CD/issue tracking/wiki/etc. features, though both Github and Gitlab offer them. I'm sure they have their own particular quirks that may be a hassle to migrate between and have people relearn. I prefer to keep those tools separate, allowing the git repository be almost exclusively a git repository and spinning up other tools as needed.
We use GitLab ci, issue tracking, dep scanning, everything at work and I can report it is amazing. All self hosted and never had any issues. I’ve got our entire deployment process setup through GitLab ci and it’s been rock solid. It’s $150/month per seat for the ultimate tier, but it’s 100% been worth it for us.
Doesn't GitLab suffer from the same problem of pushing AI? They have many AI features, and position themselves as "The most-comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform".
I'm not using any AI features, and I'm not even aware of any, but I did see it on their website too and it's a bit concerning. My hope is that it's just something they have to say right now and not a strategic direction. Otherwise I will definitely switch to self-hosting, even though the managed CI/CD in the cloud has been working very well for me.
As the kids would say, Gitlab CI is the GOAT.
Yeah, GitHub is cooked. Now's a good time to consider migrating to alternative forges like Tangled (https://tangled.sh; bit of a shameless plug, I'll admit. I'm the co-founder). We've got a more advanced PR flow, jujutsu change-id support and we just launched our in-house CI! https://blog.tangled.sh/ci
Long-term, we aim to be the new social coding platform, collectively built in the open.
Tangled is a pretty cool idea, but I'm sorry to say that I'm hoping Gerrit gets a resurgence.
It fits my "do one thing, do it well" philosophy as it doesn't have opinions about CI, Issue trackers or even how you view the code online.
I'll admit that it's a nasty bastard to set up properly though, and the options for viewing repositories are universally terrible when not bundled with a code-review system (like Gitea, Github and Gitlab). Alas.
There are .rpm/.deb packages for Gerrit that make installation/upgrades pretty simple.
The fact that it stores everything in files on disk (no databases except for caches that can be regenerated) makes backup/restore and replication a breeze compared to many other more complicated systems.
Yeah, fair enough. Gerrit is solid software but it’s really just a review tool: not an alternative code forge — which we’re aiming to be.
You say "forge" and stuff like "collectively built in the open"? Do you consider the repos "public", "private" or what?
You have a very short privacy policy [https://tangled.sh/privacy], but no guarantees of AI-bot-scraping protection. What if anything is your users' expectation of privacy of their repos against third parties, including malicious ones? Really you need to set that out clearly in your privacy policy.
Not sure I understand your first comment. Repositories are currently public only since we’re built on the AT Protocol, which doesn’t yet have private data (in the works!).
Thanks for the feedback re: the privacy policy. It’s still actively being improved and we take a lot of effort to protect against AI scrapers. I’ll update the policy verbiage to include that.
1 reply →
Plug or not, this is relevant and on-topic. +1 to offset this unnecessary voting behavior.
Github Pages is a must too.
We’re working on it!
Damn, why all the downvotes?
Probably "bit of a shameless plug, I'll admit. I'm the co-founder". Lots of HN users don't like feeling advertised to.
2 replies →
Besides the plug, calling a company with $2B+ revenue "cooked" is annoying.
Surprised it took this long. I am working with Github sales team on straightening out our Github organization at my new job and it was weird to get a Zoom meeting invite from a company that has been part of Microsoft for nearly 10 years
Would probably help if Teams wasn't such a clusterfuck. God help you if your other user is in a sovereign microsoft cloud on their desktop client.
Seven years. And that is because they didn’t want to mess with it like all the other acquisitions.
Microsoft’s software quality is poor. Azure is extremely bloated and difficult to use, and I suspect only gained market traction due to bundling/anti-competitive tactics. Microsoft inserts tabloids news into its operating system.
GitHub is their most trusted “tech” brand by far, and it has their only successful AI product, Co-Pilot.
It’s almost inevitable that GitHub and all its products will be consumed with Microsoft bloat in the next 5 years as more and more products coast off the GitHub brand.
Expect tabloid news in GitHub products soon.
>Microsoft’s CoreAI team is a new engineering group led by former Meta executive Jay Parikh. It includes Microsoft’s platform and tools division and Dev Div teams, with a focus on building an AI platform and tools for both Microsoft and its customers.
This is so confusing. The "CoreAI" team is apparently doing everything except the core of AI, which is LLMs.
I do not think of Github as primarily an AI product or service. That Microsoft does is certainly alarming.
I still feel that there's no competitor I like as much. But that may not matter.
This company was feature complete a decade ago and is just following the natural lifecycle of post acquisition decay into irrelevancy.
Interested to see what East River Source Control [0] are going to build on jujutsu. Not affiliated in anyway but keen to see a GitHub competitor break out to scale, adoption.
0. https://ersc.io/
I think many of the concerns are valid, but I'm not sure I'd read too much into the name of the absorbing org. Org names at Microsoft end up being misaligned and unintuitive all the time.
While that may be true, I don't think the specific name of the team at Microsoft absorbing GitHub is what's concerning users. I can't think of a team up there that wouldn't be a red flag in this case.
I’m pretty sure the fact that it’s the AI team is a pretty big factor. It would at least make sense if it was, for example, the Azure team.
Give Up GitHub https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/
Sorta related, I was thinking recently: after much personal experience with the terrible PR review performance over the last couple years, and the recent blog posts covering terrible performance across GitHub features, I remembered that GitHub is a Microsoft product now.
So I expect everything about the GitHub experience to degrade to (awful, slow, poorly designed) Teams/Outlook quality, since Microsoft doesn't really care about your experience as long as you're locked in and you can eventually accomplish what your job requires of you.
Not surprising. The OpenAI partnership is fading. The GenAI as a product space overall is looking a bit frothy and house of cards-ish. GitHub is a strong product that is ripe for GenAI features that make it more interesting.
Like it or not this makes sense as a business move. Microsoft is positioning itself for the next phase of the current AI hype cycle where standalone AI products will struggle and the “it’s a feature not a product” phase will take hold.
Can’t GitHub just stick to its core business instead of rushing into AI slop? The growth of vibe coding absolutely already benefits GitHub if they maintain the core business.
If they fuck up the core business rushing into AI, then aren’t they likely to get replaced by something else that does the core thing better?
Not to mention all the earnest worries about them reading private codebases to train AI nobody asked for.
You’d think being a trusted source of truth for many critical codebases would be “enough”
Time to move to forgio[1]. Sadly I am stuck with gitlab for now until forgio ads projects/folders to the URI.
[1] https://forgejo.org/
Moving stuff to AI teams reminds me of Google stuffing Google+ in everything back in the day. Didn't go well.
Migrated to Codeberg a few months ago. Everything's good.
We'll know it's over when Github requires a Microsoft login.
I'm surprised it's still not the case for new users.
this is an underrated comment, reminds of what happened to skype (still sad about that...)
The GitHub website experience is already messed up with forcing Copilot into everything. But then asking for user feedback about new setting options for issues but denying any request for a user default.
This surely isn't going in any good direction. What's next ads in commits?
Not commits, but view your repo and see ads for all the paid tier services of the packages you use.
I can't even use the Github site without hitting rate limits all the time.
And the hot take is that Azure devops, including git and the pipelines, is actually better. That Github yaml trash is just a pain.
I feel that GitHub has gotten worse lately.
* Actions are more finicky, both private (paid) and public, they crash and hang more.
* Publishing changes without testing them: https://github.com/actions/toolkit/pull/2106
* 5+ second loads on the GitHub mobile app
* AI buttons everywhere (Your administrator can pay for CoPilot)
* Releasing Node24, completely skipping Node22 in their actions: https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/tag/v2.327.1
One of the most disgusting features that they did build is the ability for administrators to check how often a user accepts the CoPilot suggestions.
I was about to complain that they still don't have YAML anchors, but it seems that that was merged in 7 days ago: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1182#issuecomment-3...
Lots of actions repos are stopping active development, including actions/checkout and actions/cache: https://mastodon.social/@hugovk/114987592399377240
> Correction, August 11th: GitHub was already part of CoreAI, but its leadership will no longer be under a single CEO.
So there is no real org change, just the CEO left and they didn't immediately replace him with a new one.
GitHub has been a growing disappointment for quite a while.
1. GitHub itself isn't opensource despite being the opensource forge.
2. Microsoft (of all companies) acquired it.
3. Microsoft pushes VSCode and kills GitHub's Atom.
4. GitHub employees are quite political (master branch rename, ICE protest resignations, etc).
5. GitHub striking down repositories and user accounts (the Russian developer, yt-dlp, etc).
6. LLMs trained on public and private code without consent or opting in.
7. GitHub forcing AI agents in pull requests and in various pages on GitHub.
8. GitHub's CEO resigning and now in more of Microsoft's AI control.
I left back when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft. I wondered if it was a mistake for me to leave, but.. I haven't regretted it yet.
> GitHub employees are quite political (master branch rename, ICE protest resignations, etc).
ah ok so the politics of power aren't of interest to you
> LLMs trained on public and private code without consent or opting in.
ah ok so the politics of power ARE of interest to you
what's goin on here man
Let the skypification begin! I can't wait to see how they integrate internet explorer, or require a microsoft account.
The only good they can do by this is remove those accounts that just signed up with cool usernames and never showed up again
I understand why GitHub is a core asset for CoreAI, but it saddens me that GitHub isn’t respected as a standalone business in its own right.
I wonder how long before Microsoft starts pushing people using Github into MS ecosystem - MS logins, showing MS AI down user's throats, pushing actions towards "works on Azure, don't care about the rest", etc. ?
Github logins are MS logins already, and being pushed to use all over the place.
Github documentation is already pushing primarily Azure, for example https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/deploy/deploy-to-... has 8 Azure links up front, then 1 link for AWS, 1 for Google, and 1 about Apple.
And don't forget that NPM is Microsoft property too, https://docs.github.com/en/actions/tutorials/publish-package... has no equivalent document for e.g. JSR.
So much spin. Bottom line is that it’s embarrassing for GitHub to have lost the ai coding race (or to be losing badly).
Everything is possible to be integrated to AI, AI expectation is so huge, even Google is try to implement AI into search engine. it's not much surprise that Github become the rock on the road for MS to AI.
This is common. Big company buys smaller company. Smaller company execs stay on and establish the idea of independence. Eventually smaller company execs move on and Big company fills the ranks with their employees. Nothing sinister. Just how it goes.
I'm still shocked that Google didn't have the foresight to buy GitHub...
Wild. He was just on the decoder podcast last week. https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/72...
Well, that's my stage left... I had already brought my github usage to bare minimum... For any of my clients through my business, I'm suggesting they host their own gtt repo's and only using Github and Gitlab for the visibility, not as an actual service to house their shit
Just more proof that the merger/acquisition should never have been allowed in the first place.
Like it or not, mergers/acquisitions are matters of money, not whether you like the product or not. In fact, all corporations are beholden to make the most money, not the best products. Frequently the product that makes the most money is the one that constantly nags you to give it more money, which everyone hates.
Today I watched the WHY2025 talk about what happened to XS4ALL (a Dutch hacker-ethic ISP). Here's the summary: "we sold our profitable smallish independent startup with anti-corporate culture to a big corporation for lots of money, because we thought they'd continue it being awesomely anti-corporate, but all they did was squeeze our customers for more money, lay off all our staff and then move the customers to the corporation's own brand. We fought them in the courts, but the courts decisively ruled they were allowed to do all that because they own us, and it turns out they'd got expensive lawyers who did all the paperwork and pulled the right strings to make us look like the bad guys." Like, no shit? What were you expecting to happen? Does this story sound familiar to you?
Everyone needs to realize "the scorpion and the frog" is about corporations. Anyway, there's nothing illegal about selling your soul for money. It's almost mandatory in fact.
Perhaps it's nothing, but:
> “GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon,” says Dohmke in a memo to GitHub employees today. “I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world.”
Is interesting to me. There is quite a number of rumors that MSFT will be Returning to Office next year. The prominence of 'remote first' in this quote may indicate that such concerns are playing a role here...
So Github has entered Phase 3 of the Microsoft Acquisition lifecycle
Interesting that they always focus more on AI while their product is less and less usable. I want a usable and efficient pull request page, not useless AI features. Seems like the priorities are all wrong. The enshittification of GitHub is absolutely dramatic.
> which will [..] operate independently
-- Satya Nadella, 2018
in the acquisition announcement https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github...
I mean, it has been over 7 years since then. I don't think anyone would reasonably assume that to mean it would operate independently in perpetuity.
I am part of a rocketry group I wonder if training on sensitive data such as ITAR restricted code would make this an issue? any ideas?
Wait, isn't that the guy that two weeks ago said that we should be embracing AI or existing the industry?
- 2-nd of Aug 2025 Github CEO delivers stark message to developers: "Embrace AI or get out of the industry" https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...
- 11-th of Aug 2025 Github CEO resigns https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas...
You can't make this stuff up :) Maybe he didn't embrace AI hard enough, and that's why he is exiting the industry?
Was it ever "independent"? The github monoculture seemed alarming from the get go
Damn. I remember being heavily downvoted and flamed when I said this would be the inevitable outcome on Reddit when they were bought.
Always assume anyone carrying water for a mega corp is a shill or a bot or some combo.
Same. Everyone now is like surprise pikachu face and all I can do is say "I told you so"
Never make a deal with the devil.
Looks like the goal is to turn Github into an "agent factory". And they still can't even support IPv6.
That’s par for the course, since OpenAI’s API endpoints don’t either. ;)
[dead]
> GitHub moving into Core AI team
On the one hand, this probably means it gets the funding it needs to keep going strong.
On the other hand, I'm worried that this means that GitHub is going to focus exclusively on building AI features while the core product becomes stale/abandoned.
Did GitHub have a funding problem? They doubled revenue last year, with 40% of that coming from GitHub Copilot. I imagine that for 2025, the increase will be much higher than even that.
I expect that the problem that Microsoft aims to fix is that people can use GitHub effortlessly without locking into Azure and Power Platform
> Did GitHub have a funding problem?
I don't believe so, and I didn't mean to imply that. Rather just that if they are part of the "Core AI" org then they will likely remain a priority area of investment for Microsoft...right now anyway.
> while the core product becomes stale/abandoned
Im more concerned about random breakages. When you have org pressure to add features rapidly shit breaks. Stale would be best case scenario.
Will it be Bob or Clippy?
$ git commit
The git command has been changed to bob, please type 'bob commit' to commit.
Yikes
GitHub was such a cool product of its time, the complete epitome of ridiculous SV tech companies. The Oval Office. The whiskey library. A room full of swag. A product ubiquitously known by every nerd in the bay, then, world. I didn’t work there, but it was cool to be around it in SF at the time. Always sad to see them fall apart (yes yes I know it’s been happening for a long time)
I am shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked.
I still remember Atom.
IMO this was predictable and I recall walking a few people in the industry through the argument and suggesting they maintain a path to migrate off GitHub for when it finally gets re-orged.
Whenever someone makes a promise that a subsidiary or product will remain unchanged (typically because that's how customers/users prefer it), it's useful to ask whether that promise has any legal force that will prevent the company from reneging on the promise if organizational or market circumstances change.
There is almost never a barrier to having the organization change their mind, which means that the promise is at best a soft promise that in the near term they don't intend to change too much too quickly.
GitHub was getting more and more corrupt as Microsoft matured it. The worst were the fake stars and engagement from bots. Then Big Tech gatekeepers fast tracked your job application if they saw you had hundreds of stars (they didn't care if it was fake).
From:
https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas...
>GitHub has operated as a separate company ever since Microsoft acquired it.
Yeah, right.
And Santa Claus exists, Virginia.
Oxymoron of the decade ...
https://www.google.com/search?q=oxymoron+meaning
Ah so do we enter the Extinguish phase now?
Maintaining "independence" after selling the company to MSFT has always been a facade. Even from the perspective of the users, there was this palpable difference between before and after MSFT acquisition
Sucks they trained on our data and hard work when all we wanted was a place to put our code and have others look at it.
Microsoft ruins everything they touch. They will find a way to ruin Github shortly.
Anyone posting a step-by-step to do a full migration from Github to another provider would get a lot of traffic to their blog in short time.
You really didn't see that coming at the moment they bought Github? That was their entire intent, to have full access to all of the greatest minds in software... Everyone should have bailed immediately after acquisition... If you don't control the servers that your code is on, it's no longer your code, at the very least, you're sharing with your hosting provider. But, everyone needs to hurry up and jump to market, instead of taking the time to build their own servers, custom development environment, etc. So, because everyone followed the herd, now everyone is lead slaughter... This was a collective choice made out of laziness, convenience, false sense of necessity, greed, etc... We have no to blame but ourselves, because it wouldn't have happen if we didn't choose it...
It was never independent from day zero, since it was always going to be sold to M$OFT or other.
I hope GitHub keeps autonomy somehow and stays away from the dumpster fire that is Azure.
I hope GitHub dies. Microsoft should not have so much power over open source software.
Higher the mcap, higher the pressure for rev growth, higher the garbage pushed
All your code are belong to MSCodeLLMTrainer.exe now
lol GitHub was in no shape way or form “independent” prior to this.
The lack of tech literacy among tech bloggers is incredibly disappointing. I wish I could say it was shocking, but that’s not true.
[dupe] more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864929
Never trust Microsoft, when they are approaching, it's always time to quit
Looks like I made the right move
Embrace, (check) Engulf, (check)
... Extinguish?
Maybe time to buy GTLB?
https://robinhood.com/stocks/GTLB
Rails is hard to maintain tgat is why github is slow to innovate.
Uh oh
Does this mean source code might get synthesized and anonymized so Ai coding agents can train on it?
Expect Github to get worse. Much worse.
That didn't take long. There appears to be some kind of outage now, I'm seeing unicorns all over the place. I even got a 403 from githubstatus.com.
Why?
Microsoft customer experience is usually horrible.
What more damage can they do besides train AI on all code without consent? Oh wait i guess fisting ads into other peoples code somehow...
One tried-and-true classic is to delete old stuff, and GitHub has a lot of old stuff... in a couple years someone will calculate an amount they can save.
Who knows? Deprecate manual code writing someday? 'You're trying to commit some code, sir, but Microsoft Defender©, Git Edition™ has determined it wasn't generated by any of our tools, as reported by telemetry, so changes have been blocked for your own convenience, safety and ultimately, wellbeing. Starting september, 2029 we're only accepting commands from Microsoft products such as Visual Studio Autocode©, Cortana AGI Edition™ and Microsoft Office 2028 Clippy©. Please ask Microsoft James Bond® to take action and he'll solve the issue for you [Charges may apply]. We're also deprecating git push, pull, etc. since Microsoft Tools are so much more secure, optimized and convenient that nobody wants to use those ancient commands anymore.'
It’s Microsoft. Look how much they’ve mismanaged their current assets.
Today we can still anonymously clone repos.
They could spam you with low-quality AI (but I repeat myself) PRs. Maybe add some vaguely plausible but utterly incorrect bug reports as well.
Look at the some of the AI slop curl deals with -- https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s... -- and imagine your issues list filled with that.
I’m envisioning VSCode Vibe Server 2026 edition.
1 reply →
> What more damage can they do besides train AI on all code
That's GitHub code -> AI.
The damage will be AI code -> GitHub
CoPilot already gives (bad) code reviews on GitHub PRs.
Sorry, is anyone even remotely surprised? This has and will always be Microsoft's modus operandi.
The bit most of us seem to completely misunderstand is that the name of the capitalist game is not competition it's monopoly rent. All major corporations time and again look to capture a monopoly, it's the winning play.
[dead]
[dead]
I'm surprised no-one seem to have called for a boycott of Github because of Microsoft's involvement with the genocide in Gaza yet.
In the Netherlands we protested on Microsoft's roof: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/10/activists-in-n...
But yeah, github has been largely unaffected.
two years ago, I opened a PR asking for an LLM commit feature, and they flat-out said they weren’t doing it. Meanwhile, Cursor was eating their lunch and lapping them twice. I couldn’t believe how complacent and out-of-touch they were—it was pure laziness dressed up as “product focus.” And let’s not forget the ancient bugs rotting in their backlog that they refuse to fix. It’s like they actively don’t care about their users.
Makes sense how it's part of core AI. All code in the future will be written by AI so it's relevant categorically.
If you want to make a better version control service, then you might consider:
- Free public repositories and free API access.
- Mutual TLS authentication. Use X.509 extensions for partial delegation of authorization, so that someone can issue a certificate to themself or others with a limited set of permissions.
- Mirroring on multiple independent services.
- Allow SHA-1 (for compatibility with a lot of existing repositories that use it, and anyone using software that does not support other hashing algorithms) but also allow other more secure hashing algorithms to be used in case you do not want to use SHA-1.
- Make the HTML to work without CSS and JavaScripts (even if they can provide enhancements, do not make them required).
- Support some parts of the GitHub API, in order that existing software which uses GitHub API will be able to work with it.
- If you are making a new API as well, then it might use DER, that can use binary data, non-Unicode text data, etc better.
- Do not require TLS for read-only access to public data (but still allow using TLS even in this case).