When it arrived, GitHub was miraculous for Open Source developers. Not only did it allow you to have a platform on which to host your code and always have it updated thanks to the version control software on which it was based (Git), but it did so with a social network component that definitively boosted its growth. Everything was wonderful, but suddenly it wasn’t.
When GitHub didn’t exist. Developer Armin Ronacher I remembered GitHub before GitHub. When your Open Source software was on SourceForge, you had Trac running and that segment was filled with decentralized and anarchic Subversion repositories. It is a good way to remember how important the arrival of GitHub was, which solved almost all the problems that existed for these developers and became the backbone of the Open Source community.
The Ghostty Earthquake. Although there had already been criticism and complaints in recent months, there has been a before and after in this situation. It happened this week, when Mitchell Hashimoto, developer of ghosttyannounced that left GitHub. This terminal emulator is a project with notable popularity on GitHub (more than 52,000 stars), but its creator has become fed up with the platform’s unreliability and has declared that “this is no longer a serious place to work.”
GitHub acknowledges the problems. Last March, GitHub CTO, Vlad Fedorov, admitted in an article on the company’s official blog that the platform was indeed suffering availability problems. Hashimoto’s post seemed to set off even more alarm bells, because the same engineer published an article shortly after titled “An update on GitHub availability.” In it he apologized again, but also explained that the problems have a culprit.
At GitHub they wanted to explain that the availability problems are due to the brutal growth they have had in software creation in recent months. Source: GitHub.
Damn AI agents. This engineer indicated how in recent months they have realized that they need a redesign of GitHub that can scale by multiplying its capacity by 30. “The main reason for this rapid change is in how the software is being developed. Since the second half of December 2025, agentic development workflows have accelerated significantly.” The vibecoding phenomenon and the rise of Claude Code and other agentic development tools have caused companies and new users to develop more and more software, and that has caused reliability problems in a platform that was not prepared for this avalanche of code.
They promise to fix the problem. At GitHub they know what to do: “Our priorities are clear: first availability, then capacity, then new features.” They are going to focus entirely on that to improve the behavior of critical services and optimize availability that in April has fallen to 85%, something unacceptable for a service on which millions of developers depend. The official history of its availability makes it clear: too many yellow and red updates.
GitHub has no CEO. There is one more element that worries in the future of the company. In August 2025 Thomas Dohmke left office CEO and Microsoft did not replace him. Instead of that distributed management functions among several executives and integrated GitHub into the CoreAI division. Meanwhile, Dohmke announced in February the creation of his new startup, called Entire, which is precisely intended as an evolved successor to GitHub that proposes solutions for the new flow of software development that has emerged with AI.
The alternatives are fine, but. There are, of course, very valid alternative platforms. Among them is including Plastic SCM, from the Spanish Códice Softwarewhich in turn was purchased by Unity in 2020. There are others like CodeBerg or GitLab even more popular among the community, and even OpenAI seems want to create your own platform. Whether you do it or not, the problem with all of them is the same: GitHub had become a social network for developers, and it showed that in this case centralization provided more advantages than disadvantages. If the community now spreads out, project discovery and contributions will become fragmented.
Image | Rubaitul Azad
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