Comment by stogot
1 day ago
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
1 day ago
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.
They could add stacked diffs, large monorepo features (allow user to view a slice of a repo), better submodule support (why can’t I PR multiple repos at once?). A good desktop app that is faster than the slow web client.
Stacked diffs is a huge one, and also where improving git would also improve LLM workflows. The bottleneck after code generation is PR reviews, and stacked diffs help break down large PRs into more digest-able pieces.
If you help humans collaborate better, you help LLMs collaborate better.
2 replies →
> large monorepo features (allow user to view a slice of a repo)
I am reminded of this discussion between fb devs and git devs from 13 yrs ago:
https://public-inbox.org/git/CB5074CF.3AD7A%25joshua.redston...
git has definitely made improvements since that thread, e.g.:
https://graphite.dev/guides/git-monorepo#tools-and-strategie...
but it could still be better for the truly gargantuan of code bases. Might not be worth it? Idk. Maybe with llm generated code churn, suddenly it becomes worth it? haha.
The current desktop client is missing support for a bunch of important things too, like signing commits.
Just to think of a few, I want improved project management tools, better code review UI/UX, and cost-competitive integrated serverless hosting a la Vercel. GitHub could be a true one-stop shop with a bit more polish.
they have azure and they have github, being an cloudflare or vercel competitor is should be default and easy to achieve
idk why they didn't do that tbh, all ingredients are already there
2 replies →
> Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
Github's workflow for stacked PRs is still terrible. There's plenty of room for improvement.
GitHub personal access tokens could be a lot better. It'd be nice if you could assign tokens at the team level or you have more fine grained control over token permissions.
And yes, I know "Fine Grained Tokens" exist but they don't seem to be usable almost anywhere and the fine grain level of control isn't actually very fine grained so they kind of suck.
Fix cross-organisation "Allow edits from maintainers" #5634
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/5634
4 years and counting...
so if you create an Organization to host your project(s), now you cannot enable that maintainers make changes on incoming Pull Requests; something that is very useful and perfectly available for projects that live under a normal username.
Github Pages STILL don't have any sort of built-in analytics available. I shouldn't need GA or something else to track the basic website metrics when you absolutely know that MS and GH have been tracking these things the whole time. People have had issues up asking for this for literal years.
I've just been shunted from TFS Git (Azure DevOps?) to GitHub.
The PR UI is taking some getting used to.
Dev changes code near a comment I made? Comment is marked "Outdated" and hidden. If I open it, can I see what change they made next to the comment? Nope, I have to go find it manually!
It sorts X.Y below X.Y.A, X.Y.B etc. in the file listing.
When I select a file in the listing I'd like to just have that file open, not scroll to it in a list of all the changes.
The first PR I did showed a ton of changes that had already been merged from common history. I can see the merge commit you made, GitHub, I know you know none of these changes are actually being made.
Not caring if a required action hasn't run automatically. No "run" option, not even a "this isn't ever going to run", just "waiting for result".
Weirdly, showing the result of an action on the source branch, when it needs to pass on the merge commit.
I've not yet figured out how to require different approvers for different branches, although that one might be on my org settings. It's either the people in the codeowners file or any contributor?
No way to allow a ruleset to be bypassable while making the approvers still manually bypass it themselves. I want to know if I'm getting it wrong as much as I want to stop my junior devs messing up.
Finding conflicts in a PR between two branches that can merge cleanly if I do it locally.
Not letting you resolve conflicts in the UI if the source branch is protected, even though the UI gives you the option to commit the resolution to a new branch if you do it for an unprotected source branch.
Updating the source branch in the PR if you choose to do the above - something you can't do yourself!
Not showing branches in a hierarchy (as if they were directory paths)
For Git? Maybe not. For GitHub? IPv6 support would sure be nice: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539
Github should have the product sophistication/complexity of Atlassian with the distribution advantage of Microsoft. Anything less is an execution failure IMO.
Not even mentioning AI, which is a huge opportunity also.
"more complexity" is kind of a funny ask
> Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
Of course there are - lots of room for improving data collection and advertising revenue streams!
Microsoft would create billions of dollars in productivity if they were willing to port Magit features to Github.
Maybe not too many improvements are needed anymore? And maybe it’s a viable business without being a “growth” space?
Nah…
there's a lot that could be improved with conflict resolution and merge trains/stacked merges. see https://pijul.org for what's possible but not available in git
Issue management (e.g. bug tracking) really should be a part of Git, not a proprietary addon from Github.
Git is already fine.
One idea though, they could make a nice site like SourceHut so you can host repos and browse through them.
I mean, Microsoft has this GitHub social media site with stickers and AI, but something serious for programmers could be nice too.
Not to "git", but to repo/project management there's huge opportunities. They've been building a lot of this over the past few years.
Incorporate jujitsu, and code-based CI. YAML sucks %^#0
> Are there any improvements to be done to Git?
That's absolutely the right question to ask. If MS just left GitHub alone, it would be fine for open source projects for years to come. The enterprise side is a little different, there they still have a lot of work to do to round out some of their more advanced features.
What worries me isn't that they stop investing. What worries me is that they actively destroy the current project while turning it into AI garbage.
Do you mean git or GitHub?
Their CI / script runner tool is still total garbage. Starting with the rampant security holes (oh, make sure you pin everything you use by hash, which essentially nobody does; what was that about secure by default rather than secure by extra effort again?) and following with the only way to test it is to deploy over and over.
While git itself can be improved upon, the GitHub is not git; there are many improvements to GitHub that people have been requesting for many years now.Also, they could even just not make it worse and that would be a welcome change from their recent strategy
GitHub Actions is hot fucking garbage basically everywhere. Coming from GitLab I hate every single minute of dealing with GH Actions.
Git? Maybe not. Faster front-end would be decent improvement.
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.