Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service
(theregister.com)268 points by Brajeshwar 3 hours ago
268 points by Brajeshwar 3 hours ago
> a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system
having used gerrit 10 years ago there's nothing about github's PRs that I like more, today.
> code navigation simply in a web browser
this is nice indeed, true.
> You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly.
if only. GHA are a hot mess because somehow we've landed in a local minimum of pretend-YAML-but-actually-shell-js-jinja-python and they have a smaller or bigger outage every other week, for years now.
> why developers like it so much
most everything else is much worse in at least one area and the most important thing it's what everyone uses. no one got fired for using github.
The main thing I like about Github's PRs is that it's a system I'm already familiar with and have a login/account for. It's tedious going to contribute to a project to find I have to sign up for and learn another system.
I've used Gerrit years ago, so wasn't totally unfamiliar, but it was still awkward to use when Go were using it for PRs. Notably that project ended up giving up on it because of the friction for users - and they were probably one of the most likely cases to stick to their guns and use something unusual.
> Notably [go] ended up giving up on [gerrit]
That's not accurate. They more or less only use Gerrit still. They started accepting Github PRs, but not really, see https://go.dev/doc/contribute#sending_a_change_github
> You will need a Gerrit account to respond to your reviewers, including to mark feedback as 'Done' if implemented as suggested
The comments are still gerrit, you really shouldn't use Github.
The Go reviewers are also more likely than usual to assume you're incompetent if your PR comes from Github, and the review will accordingly be slower and more likely to be rejected, and none of the go core contributors use the weird github PR flow.
> having used gerrit 10 years ago there's nothing about github's PRs that I like more, today.
I love patch stack review systems. I understand why they're not more popular, they can be a bit harder to understand and more work to craft, but it's just a wonderful experience once you get them. Making my reviews work in phabricator made my patchsets in general so much better, and making my patchsets better have improved my communication skills.
> In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser.
IMHO the vanilla Github UI sucks for code browsing since it's incredibly slow, and the search is also useless (the integrated web-vscode works much better - e.g. press '.' inside a Github project).
> as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners
The only good about the Github CI system are the free runners (including free Mac runners), for everything else it's objectively worse than the alternatives (like Gitlab CI).
I don't agree with this at all. I think the reason Github is so prominent is the social network aspects it has built around Git, which created strong network effects that most developers are unwilling to part with. Maintainers don't want to loose their stars and the users don't want to loose the collective "audit" by the github users.
Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality, and like it or not are now part of modern software engineering. Developers are more likely to use a repo that has more stars than its alternatives.
I know that the code should speak for itself and one should audit their dependencies and not depend on Github stars, but in practice this is not what happens, we rely on the community.
> a well-formed CI system
Man :| no. I genuinely understand the convenience of using Actions, but it's a horrible product.
One of my favourite GitHub features is the ability to do a code search over the whole of GitHub, not sure GitLab has the same when I use to use it?
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
That's not a Victorinox you're looking at, it's a cheap poorly made enshittified clone using a decades old playbook (e-e-e).
The focus on "Sponsorship buttons" and feature instead of fixing is just a waste of my time.
I have sympathy for some of the GitHub complaints. otoh just went to try to signup for Codeberg and it's down ... 95% uptime over the last 2 weeks?
There have been complaints about it on Reddit as well. I registered an account recently and to me the annoying thing is the constant "making sure you are not a bot" check. For now I see no reason to migrate, but I do admit Forgejo looks very interesting to self-host.
https://tangled.org/ is building on ATProto
1. use git or jj
2. pull-request like data lives on the network
3. They have a UI, but anyone can also build one and the ecosystem is shared
I've been considering Gerrit for git-codereview, and tangled will be interesting when private data / repos are a thing. Not trying to have multiple git hosts while I wait
I, too, am extremely interested in development on Tangled, but I miss two features from GitHub - universal search and Releases. the web frontend of Tangled is so fast that I am still getting used to the speed, and jj-first features like stacked PRs are just awesome. kinda reminds me of how Linux patch submitting works.
I mean, they're battling with DDoS all the time. I follow their account on Mastodon, and they're pretty open about it.
I believe the correct question is "Why they are getting DDoSed this much if they are not something important?"
For anyone who wants to follow: https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg
Even their status page is under attack. Sorry for my French, but WTF?
Crazy. Who would have an incentive to spend resources on DDoS'ing Codeberg? The only party I can think of would be Github. I know that the normalization of ruthlessness and winner-takes-all mentality made crime mandatory for large parts of the economy, but still cannot wrap my mind around it.
Not just them. For example, Qt self hosted cgit got ddos just two weeks ago. No idea why random open source projects getting attacked.
> in the past 48 hours, code.qt.io has been under a persistent DDoS attack. The attackers utilize a highly distributed network of IP addresses, attempting to obstruct services and network bandwidth.
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2025-Nove...
> Who would have an incentive to spend resources
That's not how threat analysis works. That's a conspiracy theory. You need to consider the difficulty of achieving it.
Otherwise I could start speculating which large NAS provider is trying to DDoS me, when in fact it's a script kiddie.
As for who would have the most incentives? Unscrupulous AI scrapers. Every unprotected site experiences a flood of AI scrapers/bots.
Try exposing a paswordless SSH server to outside to see what happens. It'll be tried immediately, non-stop.
Now, all the servers I run has no public SSH ports, anymore. This is also why I don't expose home-servers to internet. I don't want that chaos at my doorstep.
GitHub uptime isn't perfect either. You will notice these outages from time to time if your employer is using it for more than just "store some git repos", e.g. using GHA for builds and deploys, packages etc.
Additional note on Codeberg, which I think is great as a project, but I got curious on what infrastructure they are running on and how reliable this would be for larger corporate repos.
Nov 22, 2025 https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-u...
Quotes from their website:
Infrastructure status [...] We are running on 3 servers, one Gigabyte and 2 Dell servers (R730 and R740).
Here's their current hardware: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/meta/src/branch...
[...] Although aged, the performance (and even energy efficiency) is often not much worse than with new hardware that we could afford. In the interest of saving embodied carbon emissions from hardware manufacturing, we believe that used hardware is the more sustainable path.
[...] We are investigating how broken Apple laptops could be repurposed into CI runners. After all, automated CI usage doesn't depend on the same factors that human beings depend on when using a computer (functioning screen, speakers, keyboard, battery, etc.). If you own a broken M1/M2 device or know someone who does, and believe that it is not worth a conventional repair, we would be happy to receive your hardware donation and give it a try!
[...] While it usually holds up nicely, we see sudden drop in performance every few days. It can usually be "fixed" with a simple restart of Forgejo to clear the backlog of queries.
Gives both early-Google as well as hackerspace vibes, which can or can not be a good thing.
The main function of GitHub is really just advertising or at least broadcasting your work. I would use GitHub issues, stars, etc as an (imperfect gauge) of the quality of a library. This is not because of GitHub's features, just that it's the biggest and most well known. And yes I know buying stars is a thing, which is why it's part of the evaluation and not the whole ballgame.
Now that zig is fairly well known and trusted, it makes sense that this is less of a concern to migrate away from
They also made the disastrous update to the dashboard feed which made the frontpage pretty much useless.
oh wow. I just had to press the "Try the new experience!" button about ten times for it to finally load the new experience, but I like it
I think once Codeberg becomes federated, it will likely attract a lot of people.
Right now github is great for discovering and tracking projects, reflecting growth via the star and fork system (although a bit broken in the last few years).
If a federated layer is applied to these github alternatives, you could have an account in Codeberg, and be able to track lots of projects wherever people want to host them. Right now, I see a lot of forgejo servers, but I don't want to register in all of them.
To be fair this has more to do with Github Actions than Github, which from the beginning was never really going to rival any professional solution.
The people at Zig should use proper CI tools and not something that a big service provider is offering as an afterthought.
LLMs are useful, but AI is itself a marketing term that has begun to lose its luster. It’s rapidly becoming an annoying or trendy label, not a cutting edge one.
I guarantee that in ~24 months, most AI features will still remain in some form or another on most apps, but the marketing language of AI-first will have evaporated entirely.
> AI is itself a marketing term that has begun to lose its luster. It’s rapidly becoming an annoying or trendy label, not a cutting edge one.
Where have you been the last 15 years? However, I agree with your prediction. Coke making AI advertisements may have had cache a couple years ago, but now would be a doofus move.
previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46064571
Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg - 883 comments
Didn't know about codeberg and can't even access it... Is it https://codeberg.org/ ??
That is correct. It is down quite a bit. https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg
92% uptime? What do you do the other 8% of the time? Do you just invoke git push in a loop and leave your computer on?
I totally agree, Microsoft is ruining everything with AI, like all Microsoft product have been on decline for years even before the LLM era, and now they are on an even steeper decline.
it makes me sad to see that github is now going through the same shit, and people are using other random half-ass alternatives, it’s not easy to keep track of your favourite open-source projects across many source forgeries. we need someone to buy github from Microsoft and remove all the crap they have added to it.
I don't get it, why did they allow GitHub bot to modify and merge pull request automatically? Yeah I agree that MS is ruining everything with AI, but this problem is avoidable, if they turn off the bot's auto merge feature, or turn it off completely. The reason they move to a lesser known Git provider sounds more like a marketing stunt.
What are you referring to? I may be missing a line from the article but it seems mostly focused around a lingering GitHub Actions bug and the direction of GitHub.
Indeed. Github is a nightmare when I'm working on an unreliable 4G connection too (e.g. on a train in the UK). Half the page will load.
Night and day compared to something like Linear.
A better benchmark is done through the web browser inspector (network tab or performance tab). In the network tab I got (cache disabled)
Github
158 requests
15.56 MB (11.28 transferred)
Finish in 8.39s
Dom loaded in 2.46s
Load 6.95s
Codeberg
9 requests
1.94 MB (533.85 transferred)
Finish in 3.58s
Dom loaded in 3.21s
Load 3.31sThat depends on location and GitHub pages generally take a while to execute all the javascript for a usable page even after the html is fetched while pages on Codeberg require much less javascript to be usable and are quite usable even without javascript.
Here are my results for what it's worth
$ time curl -o /dev/null -s -L 'https://codeberg.org'
real 0m0.907s
user 0m0.027s
sys 0m0.009s
$ time curl -o /dev/null -s -L 'https://github.com/'
real 0m0.514s
user 0m0.028s
sys 0m0.016sI hate these constant drama posts, but I am all for seeing competition. I think it's good to have a couple of top-tier companies offering the same service, and especially with git, it's been... lacklustre outside of Github, I'd say. Bitbucket was totally nice, but Atlassian and Jira and meh... Github has (mostly) steered clear of cross-product promotions until the CoPilot era washed all over us, and I wonder for how long they can continue to thrive off the power of brand-awareness.
Same effect at play watching all the top-tier AI corps under heavy competitive fire still, trying hard to keep the audience attached while battling to stay on top of (or keep up with) the competition. This mainly (for now) benefits the user. If OpenAI were to trailblaze on their own, we'd all be paying through the roof for even the most basic GPT by now.
Last week the reason for the move was MS tools being used by the baddies. Today AI is the baddie du jour. To use a great quote "either do or don't, but I got places to be".
The original post was specifically about technical grievances, “MS tools being used by the baddies” was mentioned only in passing.
https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/
> Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE
That was the extent of it. Six words.
Furthermore, this submission is an independent post, not from Zig, reporting on the original and adding more context.
> To use a great quote "either do or don't, but I got places to be".
What exactly is your complaint? The move had already been completed at the time of the original Zig post. They did do it.
There’s no incongruence between posts. The nature of your discontent or how it could possibly affect you isn’t clear in the slightest.
More and more projects are moving to Codeberg, and I'm wondering; at what point will a critical mass be reached? Or will we end up with a fragmented ecosystem?
Oh no, our decentralized VCS will be… decentralized!
Seriously though the big problem to solve will be squatters, when there are three logical places for a module to be hosted. That could create issues if you want to migrate.
I would rather have this happening after a contender to git has surfaced. Something for instance with more project tracking built in so migration were simpler.
I was slightly wrong. You can manually mirror things, but they have removed a feature that allowed one to automatically mirror repositories hosted elsewhere. It was originally intended as an ease of migration tool, but ended up consuming too many resources.
From their FAQ:
> Why can't I mirror repositories from other code-hosting websites?
> Mirrors that pull content from other code hosting services were problematic for Codeberg. They ended up consuming a vast amount of resources (traffic, disk space) over time, as users that were experimenting with Codeberg would not delete those mirrors when leaving.
> A detailed explanation can be found in this blog post.[1]
[1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/mirror-repos-easily-created-consum...
I say "I'm not making yet another account to report this bug". Tangled is trying to solve that problem but we'll see.
That's the beauty of email-based approaches. You can just clone, do your changes and `git send-email`. Done.
I think it would've been far easier to build a decent GUI around that flow, with some email integration + a patch preview tool, rather than adding activitypub, but oh well.
I literally logged into codeberg using my GitHub account. It's two clicks of the mouse to do this.
Hopefully one of the efforts to build distributed pull requests will take off, so that all the forges other than github can band together and interoperate.
Zig is distributed under the MIT License. MS is completely with in their rights to clone the git repository from Codeberg and do whatever with the source code. Including feeding it to their AI algorithms. Moving it to Codeberg doesn't really fix that. I get that some people want to restrict what people can do with source code (including using it for capitalist purposes or indeed ai/machine learning). But the whole point of many open source licenses (and especially the MIT license) is actually the opposite: allowing people to do whatever they want with the source code.
The Zig attitude towards AI usage is a bit odd in my view. I don't think it's that widely shared. But good for them if they feel strongly about that.
I'm kind of intrigued by Codeberg. I had never heard of it until a few days ago and it seems like that's happening in Berlin where I live. I don't think I would want to use it for commercial projects but it looks fine for open source things. Though I do have questions about the funding model. Running all this on donations seems like it could have some issues long term for more serious projects. Moving OSS communities around can be kind of disruptive. And it probably rules out commercial usage.
This whole Github is evil anti-capitalist stance is IMHO a bit out of place. I'm fine with diversity and having more players in the market though; that's a good thing. But many of the replacements are also for profit companies; which is probably why many people are a bit disillusioned with e.g. Gitlab. Codeberg seems structured to be more resilient against that.
Otherwise, Github remains good value and I'm getting a lot of value out of for profit AI companies providing me with stuff that was clearly trained on the body of work stored inside of it. I'm even paying for that. I think it's cool that this is now possible.
> Zig is distributed under the MIT License. MS is completely with in their rights to clone the git repository from Codeberg and do whatever with the source code. Including feeding it to their AI algorithms. Moving it to Codeberg doesn't really fix that. I get that some people want to restrict what people can do with source code (including using it for capitalist purposes or indeed ai/machine learning). But the whole point of many open source licenses (and especially the MIT license) is actually the opposite: allowing people to do whatever they want with the source code.
MS training AIs on Zig isn't their complaint here. They're saying that Github has become a worse service because MS aren't working on the fundamentals any more and just chasing the AI dream, and trying to get AI to write code for it is having bad results.
Lack of investment more like. There are a ton of simple and obvious bugs that have persisted well before the AI crazy, e.g. this annoying bug from 2021: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/6874
This one is almost a one-line change (technically they need an extra flag in the YAML but that's hardly difficult): https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/12882#discussi...
That said, I still think Github is fine, and you can't argue with free CI - especially on Windows/Mac. If they ever stop that I'll definitely consider Codeberg. Or if Codeberg gets support for stacked PRs (i.e. dependencies between PRs), then I'm there! So frustrating that Github doesn't support such an obvious workflow.
> So frustrating that Github doesn't support such an obvious workflow.
It kind of does.
I used this a lot in several jobs to work in dependent tickets in advance. Just make another branch on top of the previous (a PR to the other PR branch).
People could review the child PR before the parent was merged. And it requires some less than trivial git knowledge to manage effectively, but nothing extraordinary. Any solution for stacked PRs based on git would also require it (or a custom tool).
I think I'm on their side on this one. From git perspective, it works just as I expect. Something else probably belongs to JIRA or project management instead.
That feels like the opposite of what I think stacked PRs are? Like someone will open PR #1 for one feature, and then PR #2 into the PR #1 branch, but it doesn't make sense without knowing the context of PR #1 so that gets reviewed first - and then when that PR gets merged, the second one gets automatically closed by GitHub?
PR#1: dough PR#2: toppings
You first send PR#1, then PR#2 on top of the first one.
The diff for PR#1 will show dough stuff. The diff for PR#2 will show toppings in relation to dough.
People can review them asynchronously. If you merge PR#1, PR#2 will automatically target main (that's where dough went) now.
In this arrangement, I use to cross-mention the PRs by number (a link will exist in both). I also like to keep the second one draft, but that depends on the team practices.
I don't understand why you would close the second PR when the first gets merged. It should lose the dependency automagically, which is exactly what happens if you branch correctly.
Wait I thought they left because Github software engineers are "monkeys".
In other news today, Bun, which is one of the biggest projects written in Zig, joined Anthropic, the company behind Claude Code, and has nothing but kind words to say about AI. If Zig becomes ever more hostile to AI, I wonder if there may be some "friction" there.
Why would zig care that a project written in zig is used for AI?
The article is very hard to read, with ads on one side, links in every other sentence. I could not even figure out where Zig has gone... TLDR anyone?
Edit: Scrolling comments I see something called Codeberg but why am I getting connection refused?
Another edit: Oh because Codeberg is down. I had to look at another thread on the frontpage to find that out...
IMHO, the main advantage of github is that it is an ecosystem. This is a well-thought-out Swiss knife: a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system, convenient issues, as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners. In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser. You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly. Having a sponsorship system is also great, you don't have to search for external donation platforms and post weird links in your profile/repository.
All in one, that's why developers like it so much. The obsession with AI makes me nervous, but the advantages still outweigh, as for me, the average developer. For now.