Comment by JohnTHaller
1 day ago
GitHub will now fall under Microsoft's CoreAI team, which give some indication of GitHub's purpose and direction going forward.
1 day ago
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.
Man this reminds me of the early days of Edge where MS actually made a good browser for a few months and then stuffed it full of bloatware, ads, a crypto wallet (!) and now AI (not even GOOD AI features).
Do you really miss stuff in VS Code's core editor? I mean, coming to think about it, VS Code feels "feature complete", I haven't found in other editors features that I thought "wish I had this in VS Code". Not to justify the whole changelog being about Copilot (isn't it supposed to be a separate extension anyway?), but I guess it's either that or going for a while without updates, or really small changes you'd probably not notice
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Awesome, this is creating an opportunity for a new text editor. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
There is still Emacs, Sublime Text, Brief (oldie but still around), Notepad++,...
The problem are the extensions, I bash Electron all the time, yet I use VSCode almost daily because of certain extensions.
Just switched to Zed because every vscode release breaks more than fixes.
When I get fed up with VSCode, I run Emacs and I feel happy until I start working on something else that can be done a little faster on VSCode because of the available extensions.
I feel like we almost need government intervention to keep GitHub an open commons, but I am a Libertarian and I distrust the government perhaps even more than the tech industry - still an open question for me.
Lock in and control by huge corporations is almost always uniformly bad. I have accepted the message of great books like Privacy is Power, The Tech Coup, and Surveillance Capitalism, and I feel pretty good about just using Google’s Gemini APIs when I need them, and lean as hard as possible on open models running on Ollama and LM Studio. There are also little things you can do like not installing apps and using web apps.
Back to test editors: the Lem Emacs-like editor written in Common Lisp is an interesting project https://github.com/lem-project/lem
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Zed also turned into ai slob already
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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.
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
The quote actually appears to be recited from an earlier Verge article [0]:
> Parikh, who transformed Facebook engineering teams, now leads a transformation that he describes as building an AI “agent factory” for Microsoft’s customers.
> ”I described this agent factory idea to Bill [Gates], not knowing that he and Paul [Allen] described Microsoft 50 years ago as the software factory,” Parikh says. “Just like how Bill 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.”
[0] https://www.theverge.com/notepad-microsoft-newsletter/672598...
It means that Microsoft used to be a software company and it is now supposed to become a software factory company, meaning that it produces factories (=agents) that produce software. That seems like a good goal to have for them.
No. Jay is an idiot.
That sounds horrible. Who wants that??
Someone who expect to make a lot of money selling said Agents.
It sounds like the kind of plan which would come from the Xbox division.
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.
It was the American CEO Tim Cook which spent some $250 billion investing in training in China, which is more than the Marshall plan (inflation adjusted) or the CHIPS act, for outsourcing the factories to China in which their products get produced.
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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?
They were already under CoreAI team. The verge has amended the article with a footnote correction to note that.
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?
Auditors?
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The industry has collectively decided that AI is the future of all of software development, so this move shouldn't be a surprise.
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.
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
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.
Oh sure for an organization with lots of ci/cd its a big deal. But for individuals who mostly just use github as a code repository for personal projects and dont have a ton of deployments, its real easy
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?
Gitlab seems to also be going into the "AI slop" direction, unfortunately, while core CI/CD features get sidelined...
Forgejo/Codeberg seems interesting
How do you mean? I dont hold it against a company just for having an AI offering. The thing with github/Microsoft is theyre really forcing it down your throat. Github copilot is now a default UI element in Visual Studio and every time I open it up they say "use github copilot, its free!". Every update to visual studio is all about their AI crap now and legit IDE features are always listed at the end
Plus github has also been trying to be a social media sites for a while, too, which I never really apprecisted. The only reason I ever used github in the first place, as a personal user, was because its what everyone else uses on their resume. But I no longer put personal projects on my resume so I dont see the point in using github anymore. We use gitlab at work and it works great.
Though the other providers look good, too. Im not trying to denigrate them. Codeberg, however, looks like it requires a subscription fee, and im just not using enough features of my git provider to justify paying for it
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.