Will Github Survive AI? with Sam Lambert

It's been a while since we got a little technical on MOTS so I caught up with @samlambert to ask him about what is happening at Github and the fallout as one of the world's most loved pieces of software struggles to adapt to the agentic coding era.

The conclusion? It'll probably be fine idk.

Watch on X; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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Transcript

San Francisco rent prices

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Okay, so listening to a very special episode of members of technical staff, uh what Sam doesn't actually know is that I say that for every episode. So I've completely I've completely diminished the meaning of it. So I'll have to find some other sort of synonym or some shit for that. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But everything is special, right? I mean, that's the thing. I mean, like like San Francisco's back. I mean, so I have heard. Yeah. Everything is happening. Um, people are coding with like 16 agents, people are moving here and paying $5,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment to work on their AI-powered B2B SAS stuff.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

That's a cheap apartment.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

It's cheap now.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

My first apartment was ridiculously expensive. I moved here in 2015, so it's just all back again. It's not that's right, it's no worse than I remember it.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

You know, I was so yeah, so when I moved, so I was 2017 and for the apartment which sort of doubled as our college dorms. It was on Mission and Ninth. Yep. And I was splitting a uh I believe it was like a 200 square foot studio apartment with somebody else. Yeah. And I was paying 1,500.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Yeah, see. Yeah, that's wild. I couldn't believe, yeah, you just show up, you used to have to it probably still the same now. You used to have to show up with like a pre-filled credit report, which I obviously didn't have any credit because I just moved to the city. Of course. Of course. Um yeah, I mean that was wild. Yeah. I mean, still apparently it's like that again.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you know, like the bidding wars, and it's just like people, people submitting like 12 months of rent just.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Yeah, that used to happen too. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I am that old now that I can say, yeah, I remember back when this happened previously.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

I've I've been here long enough. I think I feel like 2019 was a special, it's like like that year before COVID. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

It was like everything was like it got better again though, because of COVID. They finished all the projects and everyone left. So there was loads of housing inventory showed up and now it's all gone again.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Exactly, exactly. It's you know, it's it's a it's this beautiful secular thing. Like is, like is, is that the way to put it? Basically the way that GitHub is going at the

What is happening to Github?

SPEAKER_01 1:55

moment, right? Beautiful secular, it's up and it's down and it's up and it's down. And so I figured, what better person to bring on than somebody who was a part of the great organization in which we a minor part.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

A minor part.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

I mean, he's uh, you know, I'm here to glaze, uh, I can do the glazing, that's totally fine. So but you know, but it's it's one of those things in which there's been ample commentary about it on X.com, the other thing. And so therefore, you know, why not bring someone who is technical on to members of technical staff to talk about how GitHub affects all of us, right? Massively. Massively. Massively. So I guess like where I probably would start is what's happening to GitHub? Like what's the what's that sort of like the high level? I mean, you know, you can we can we can touch on the downtime, right? We can talk or uptime or however you want to think of it now. Uptime.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Yeah, you can yeah, you can call it that. Yeah. I mean it's going down every day, right? Like it's under extreme load, which is tough and getting a lot of commentary. Like this always used to be the same. Like back in the day, we would get people very unhappy when we went down.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

It seemed like well, we had our growth, we had our scaling era. Like we had this time where we would go down a lot and it would really piss people off. It was nothing like this though. Right. This collision of like agent load and you know, just factors, I guess, with Microsoft purchasing the company a while back.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Yeah, yeah. As really That's right, because you because you actually tweeted about you, you tweeted about um the Microsoft purchase. Gosh, I I don't actually have it in my notes, but it was something along the lines of like, you know, an acquisition that Microsoft hasn't fucked up or something along those lines.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

And we all kid ourselves that this would be the one they wouldn't fuck up, but that was it.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

That was it. Here we are.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Let's hope for the next one. We can hope for the next one.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Absolutely, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Uh yeah, it's just a sad it's just sad to see it in the state and just having upset and people just constantly talking about leaving GitHub is very sad. Right.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Um Absolutely, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

It's hard to watch. I mean, uh I talked to a lot of people that used to be at GitHub, but seeing that angry unicorn creates a very different response for all of us than it does. I know it's annoying for everyone to see it, but for for people that like lived on the pager for that product.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

Right, right. It's like the like the fail, like the fail whale too.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Yeah, like just seeing it is still a terrible stress response for every everybody and like thinking what could be the problem. Um yeah, it's a sad it's a sad state of affairs, really, unfortunately. Totally. And hopefully things I believe they will stabilize things, they have to.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Um yeah, I think people are just unhappy generally. Yeah. I think you know, it's a product that's really hard to build because the audience is just so technical and cares so much about it.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 4:29

And just kind of

People loved early Github

SPEAKER_00 4:30

loved it. Like I remember I used to run into people. So I joined in 2013. I got I was there, I think I was employee 120 or something like that. So not super early, not super early, but early enough to see like a certain era for the company. People back then, even in 2013, would walk up to you and say, Oh, I pay for GitHub, even though I don't really need it. I just kind of like want you guys to do well. And people also would tell me it was the first thing they paid for online or like the first workplace.

SPEAKER_01 4:55

I was gonna say, because the 2010s were kind of like that, right? It's like like a lot of free software. A lot of free software. Like people like not necessarily willing to pay for stuff.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Correct. It was new for everybody, and people didn't love the model we had, which was like if you wanted private repos, you had to pay. Yes. But people just fell in love with the product. It was just like very pure. A lot of tech then was like selling ads or doing whatever, right? And um yeah, I think it's hits us all when we see something that we sort of grew up on. Yes, struggling or just changing so rapidly under a giant company.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Absolutely. Like, do you think do you think now it's it's

Is free software over? Will we end up paying per commit?

SPEAKER_01 5:30

I mean, I know I've seen commentary on this, right? But like, do you think in order to save GitHub there might actually have to be some sort of like pay per commit model that has to come in in order to sort of counteract all of the human like bot?

SPEAKER_00 5:46

I just think I just think it's not gonna work. I don't think anyone is gonna pay for anything that feels like a tax on being productive with like AR. You want people to go nuts. I think we either either someone comes up with a convincing alternative to GitHub, which I just can't imagine happening. Yeah. Or we're just gonna have to knuckle through this one and just hope that they correct or fix like because what was the first what was before GitHub?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

It was like SourceForge, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:07

SourceForge. Uh there was was Google code around before. I can't remember if it was before it's well behind my time. They shut it down though, and told we met with them after they did. They see it, they truly ced it to us. The announcement post actually was like very nice, like GitHub one, basically. Yep. Microsoft even had one as well. There's been so many, but there's never been one prevailing one. Yes. Uh it probably was SourceForge, but that was back like in with SVN. GitHub and Git kind of went along.

SPEAKER_01 6:33

Bitbucket was before GitHub as well, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:36

Yeah, all around the same time. Yeah, Mercurial, Bitbucket. Yep. It's not even still around. Maybe it is. Bitbucket? Yeah. I think so.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

I think so.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

I I feel like Australian Git hosting.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

I feel like when I started coding, so that would have been 2019, 2020. Yep. You know, I mean like I've I've basically like all I can say to that end is like, I've seen the name.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

Yeah, right. And there's GitLab now as well, but no one's gonna use that either.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

That's actually that was actually gonna be one of my questions was like, how like how is GitLab not making any sort of inroads here? Without having to, you know, you don't have to like you don't have to commit drive-by's.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

It's very big in enterprises. I don't know it's gonna have the community.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

It's gonna be weird. I mean, shifting communities is really hard, just just moving them from one place to the other.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Also, there's just I don't know, there was never that much of a social network to it though. That's one thing that ever I saw takes about that this morning. No, no data support it ever really having a social part. People actually didn't want to. Every time it was floated that we would connect maintainers with their audience more, the maintainers did not want that.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

Yeah, well, I mean, so many of the great maintainers are anonymous.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Yeah, that's also that's very true. They just don't want to be talking, they want to be hassled.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

So that never really worked.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

I don't know. Maybe the set maybe either GitHub turns it around, or maybe the future's more oblique, which it just doesn't become important. Yeah.

Code hosting + @zocomputer shoutout

SPEAKER_00 7:58

There's other products that are there that are doing a lot more, like Pierre are doing kind of code hosting, right? Um, which is gonna support a whole new wave of these like products where everyone's kind of doing it, right? Like you need it as part of like lovable because all these are doing it as part of like their workflow. Yep. So that's gonna dissipate some work. Um GitHub.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

I hate to I mean I hate to be an absolute shill, but Zoe Computer like works with works with me. Angel investor. Yes. Just gotta go to I've gotta like plug and do all the like financial disclosures. So there's like, you know, same sort of deal, right? I mean, it is really, really just kind of like, you know, they they do their personal personal automations, all those sorts of things, almost like an open cloud.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

And they host it themselves. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Yeah, yes. So there's that, you know, and so you know, I have a I have a stake in this game, and not necessarily against GitHub, because I still push code to GitHub when it works. And I think that is where a lot of it, you know, and I and again, this is members of technical stuff. So naturally, I have a whole host of tweets that we can actually look at. Okay. And you know what? I've completely even forgotten um what I did, so I'm gonna be reacting in real time to it. Okay. Oh, there's um Mitchell, the ghostly.

@mitchellh reaction

SPEAKER_01 9:05

So ghosty leaving GitLab.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Completely understood it, just very sad to see.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

Yes, and so this was so uh for those listening, this reads Um says Ghosty is leaving GitHub. I'm GitHub user 1299. Joined February 2008. I visited GitHub almost every single day for over 18 years. It's never been a question for me where I'd put my projects, always GitHub. I'm super sad to say this, but it's time to go. And this was 2.8 million views at 16,000 likes. Um and I was I was trying to actually see, like uh I was trying to see if he if he had picked a particular alternative that he's posted on the timeline. I mean I didn't yeah, I didn't didn't research that.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

I think he's gonna announce that soon.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

Yeah, I'm I figured as much.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

It's a shame to use lose Mitchell. He's a legend in open source. Yes. And a very earnest, undramatic person. So it's very I'm sure that got some attention. Totally, totally. Internally.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Of course, there's a lot, um, you know, there, you know, from the from the chief influencers we might call them, you

@Theo and @ThePrimeagen reactions

SPEAKER_01 10:08

know, from Theo, GitHub has been down. Uh GitHub has been down for most of the day. I'm so tired of this never being so ready to move on. Um, obviously, Primogen had a similar thing. Obviously, like in Primogen styles from April 2nd. It was foretold, but it is now reality. GitHub has achieved two nines of reliability. So this was when the uptime ticks down below 90%, 89.91% uptime. Uh that's that's a thing. And then of course, I I okay, this one was pretty funny. This one was pretty funny, I must say. So this is from Beeganbot. Um, he said,

@beginbot reaction

SPEAKER_01 10:42

I told my girlfriend I can't hang out right now. GitHub is up, so I have to work. Don't know when I'll get this chance.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

She probably won't have to wait long, you'll be back.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Yeah, did you meet did you meet Beeganbot at uh React Miami? He's he he's um he works with Prime. Uh he probably would have been in that house.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Oh yeah, I did actually. I did, yes, I actually absolutely did. Yeah. I haven't connected them to online though.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm you know so funny. Yeah, he's pretty good. He's pretty good. He I really liked his like um he had this like whole tirade like with the with the whole G-Stack posts, um, you know, many subjects.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Yeah, the G stack.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

We don't we don't have to go there. Gary Ted's a friend of the show. I've spoken about it a bit.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Growth of G Stack, partly responsible for GitHub being down as well.

SPEAKER_01 11:24

And this is so it's funny you say that because um I was talking to you earlier about

@jshchnz reaction and the codemaxxed repo

SPEAKER_01 11:30

this particular repo. And so this is from uh Josh from Century. Uh he created a repo called Codemaxed. So this was from uh not too long ago, so April 17. It was like, with my Codemax project surpassing 353 million lines of code, not a typo, I actually got a GitHub cease and desist. We've noted noticed that this repository is growing fast while committing very frequently. This looks like some sort of automated activity that serves no purpose. And if we look at the if we look at the repo, so this came about um with like Gary's hands line whole line uh thing. So so it is gone. Uh he did he did actually.

SPEAKER_00 12:12

Oh, it was just generating slot burn tokens. Using a lot of water.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

It was just out here trying to see how many lines of slot we can get to as quickly as possible, built with code maxing, SCLI, it's all purpose built, to generate the maximum possible lines of code and commits in minimum time.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Meta staff loved that one, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

I'm having to gamify that. And it was like, yeah, the the pitch, one command, one million lines, zero value to it.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

Yeah, I can tell what happened on the inside with that. Well, we used to have people used to do some nuts things back in our day. Not nothing like this, but we'd get some absolutely terribly behaving product projects that we would have to send similar notes to that would just use Git in like horrifically bad ways. I can imagine in the world of AI, it's just like unreal how much is traffic is getting hit if they're getting hit with random stuff like this. Yes, yes, and I think an impressive amount of lines of code though. 350 million in like this is anthropic bell.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

Yeah, it's it's like like yeah, 350 million likes. I think that was in just a couple of days. I mean, if you have like, I mean, it kind of makes sense if you have a auto, you know, CLI tool, auto command, committing all day long lines. But, you know, that was in response to to Gary Tan's whole 67,000.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

How many lines of code is in Gary Tan's repo now? You know what? Let's go ahead and check this out. Let's go ahead and check this out.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Well, then I'll show you on the actual. Um

What exactly are vibecoders shipping to the user?

SPEAKER_01 13:33

if I just I mean, G Stack Right, it's pretty good SEO actually.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

I did look at the size of his blog's lines of code, and it was like half the size of our full Rails app, which powers PlanetScale.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

There was so there was a whole thread picking it apart, and I think um, you know, what it what it managed to find, and I mean it's pretty easy to find when you simply just open dev tools, and it was like, I think it was like six megs, six megabytes was being shipped to the user. And so you had like, it was clear that they were trying to do image optimization. So the agent was trying to do image optimization using a library like you know, Sharp or something like that. And of course, you know, if anybody knows how image optimization works, generally with a library like that, is it you know, you will in your code base or in your in your repository, you'll have all of the different size images, right? And then you'll use a library like Sharp to basically pick the right one.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

And it was picking the largest one ever seen.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

It was picking all of them.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Oh, it delivered every single version.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

It was shipping every single one. So he had like the Edge.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Yeah, it was shipping all of them, and so you just had these like raw PNGs being shipped to the user.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Hey, you know still probably not the worst thing anyone pushed to GitHub.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

You know what? And I was and I was saying this, um, I forget exactly who I I think I think I was like, I forget exactly when I was talking about this. Um, but basically all I said it really is a miracle of like the modern web, how that was still usable. Yeah, of yeah, internet, yeah, bandwidth. Exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Like I have an optimistic spin on it, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, you know what? Like, like I have good Wi-Fi, I could access this totally fine. And things would show up and all those things, even though I'm being shipped six megabytes.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

I haven't even been on the website. I should I should look into this. The whole G stat thing kind of went past me.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Yeah, yeah. I am um, you know, it's it's like it's pretty good. I mean, it's a very, very popular thing. It's a very, very popular thing, and you know, like the whole the whole idea of like agent skills, all those sorts of things. I've not really gone down that rubber all because I don't know if those, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

No, it's you very useful. It is actually very useful. We have a whole set of R's for building internally. Totally, totally.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

Exactly, exactly.

ad break and responding to allegations

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Well, if it isn't the podcaster that for Cott to do a bunch of his ad reads again, because the interview with Sam talking about GitHub's woes was just too good to interrupt. So, L fucking loser podcaster, doesn't do his job, doesn't satisfy his contracts. Um it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate. We'll get to it in a little bit, but I just wanted to respond to a couple of allegations. No, it's not the gay allegations, unfortunately. Can't necessarily respond to that just yet. But you might have remembered uh those loyal MOTS listeners. I spoke a little bit about my body fat percentage a few episodes ago. Now, people tended to not believe me. So what have we done here? We've gone out and got a DEXA scan. What does it say? What does it say? If I can actually just get this up here, those listening are probably having a beautiful ASMR experience. What does that say there? 9.2%. 9.2% body fat. So there you fucking go. I don't really know what it means. I've never had a DEXA scan in my life. I just kind of estimated that I'd be sub 10%, so I'm glad I didn't lie. Anyway, on to who uh pays me. So basically, capu.ai, your agentic IDE. Of course, you can connect it to your Slack and get non-technicals to actually push code to your repos. It sounds fucking terrifying. Uh who else? Superbower.com. Of course, you might be wondering how I'm able to achieve a sub-10% body fat and the kind of lean mass. Well, that's by going to the gym. But I tell you what also helps with the gym, superbower.com, because it is your one-stop shop for preventative health. And of course, you can actually get the care that billionaires get for less than $200 a year. Track all of your biomarkers. I got my testosterone, checked all of these sorts of things that I find useful as a gym, bro, for a fraction of the cost of just going to, say, like a lab corp or something like that. Um most people generally don't know what to test either with those sorts of things. Uh last but not least, of course, blackbox.ai nearly got two two fucking minutes of me just yapping at you. W podcaster. Basically, blackbox.ai, of course, your one-stop shop for coding agents, coding agents, right? So go ahead and use Claude, Codex, the Blackbox agent. You can use all of these agents in one place, you can spin them up in parallel, you can use the IDE, you can use the CLI, you can use the VS Code extension. Blackbox has all of these and is trusted by over 30 million developers worldwide. I guess the last thing, um, and so this was kind of like this was kind of, you know, I sort of asked the question about um, you know, whether whether GitHub would move to sort of like a pay-per-commit, pay-per-four-view. I mean, Armjad said, if I bring up um Armjad's tweet from April 28th, so just a few days ago. So Armjad said,

@amasad reaction

SPEAKER_01 18:17

it's honestly impressive that GitHub kept the service up at all given this kind of growth. I predicted this four years ago. Free services will become untenable with the advent of human-level bots. Worth exploring micropayments, even cents per Git push might be enough to reduce spam and make this sustainable, maybe powered by Bitcoin to keep this open and accessible as opposed to KYCing users. Any thoughts on this particular theory?

SPEAKER_00 18:41

I mean, it would gate and stop spam. That's for sure that is for sure. I think it would just upset people very much.

SPEAKER_01 18:47

Of course. Well, I mean, you know, like like I mean, we I mean we kind of touched on the open source developers, right? I mean, those that want to stay anonymous. Like, there are there I think what people don't actually realise about the open source community is that there are truly people there that are just in it for the love of the city.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

They have to be.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

We used to get the Chinese government trying to find out who was behind many different repos continually at GitHub. So they attacked us for two weeks over a repo that was designed to get around the firewall.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

No way.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Yeah, they would and the Russian guy, yeah. I mean there's load loads of code on GitHub that people were desperate to find out who's behind it. Yeah or even just pushed it up. Yeah, it was um it's there's been constant I mean, there's just always forever been challenges with hosting just code. We used to get in all we got trouble because of Gamergate once. Someone put like a satirical that was scary. Um they they actually got into the office, I think. Um what goes on over, you know. Or or just randomly people would host illegal websites on GitHub pages. So we'd quite you know, a few times I'd be called into a meeting that like Interpol would show up at the office. Yep. Because that's just where they'd looked up where IPs would register or whatever. Right. It was just constant. I mean it's the same thing whenever you put something popular online, you're gonna get all of this kind of abuse. But now it must just be unbelievable. And then obviously we'd get people checking in, just like trying to check in videos and ridiculous things into and just use it as a like a free archive. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:14

Um he's right, it would work, it would just be Yeah, I mean, like I mean, to me it seems like you know, innovation code. I mean, like I see I see a lot of software innovation just coming from open source. I mean, like open claw was open source. You know, and it's like like open

Open source in the world of AI coding

SPEAKER_01 20:30

claw, I mean, if there is anything that I've been thinking about, not that I not that I code much at all nowadays, but if there's anything that I'm thinking about when it comes to like like I don't know, writing small angel checks or stuff like this, you know, OpenClaw, uh, it completely changed how I think about the way that software is moving. Because before OpenClaw, I was looking at sort of like, you know, a lot of these sorts of um, you know, these computer use products, and I was just thinking, like, look, yeah, like it's it's cool, I can see where it's going, but I'm like, it's not there yet. You know, it's not there for me to use it yet. Like I don't, you know, I don't want to go ahead and put the time in to set it up, like I can use my time better elsewhere. And then OpenClaw comes along and suddenly all of these computer use projects are just just instantly viable.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Yeah, correct. Like and it also and it showed what people want. Yes. Right, like even though people were very critical of it, they shouldn't have been. Um it just showed what people really like dug into something they want. And obviously it's like spawned a ton of other companies that are gonna do it, of course. Um in a more kind of polished way. Yeah. Like I ran it, and now I just use poke. Yeah, yeah. Um because it gives me like the same experience basically. That's right. I can tunnel, I can get like they have a tunnel thing, so you can have it tunnel and run stuff on a la on a Mac Mini or whatever, which it is. Yes. Um yeah, I mean it was it just it was very very illustrative of what people expected. It's what people wanted when AI showed up, right? They wanted this like really smart assistant. Yep. And it just gave people that. I do worry for open source in general, though, in the world of AI.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

I think we're gonna lose people are gonna lose individuals, like Peter's very unique, right? Like he'd already sold his company, this was a hobby for him. I think people that are open sourcing software to then back it by a commercial company are gonna really question in the future.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

Right. And and this is and this has sort of been I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but this I mean we've seen this trend for a little, like even well pre-open claw, right? I mean I even think I even think of Bun, right? Something something like Bun runtime being VC backed and just being acquired by Anthropic.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it was a great outcome for them. But now it's just hard, like especially with the copying that's possible now with AI. Yes. I think open source was struggling anyway. Truly is, like just the incentives, money, um, how few people maintain such critical. That's why they did GitHub sponsors, because it addresses that issue. But now the sad thing is people who've spent decades like tending to really good open source projects and now just having their work just disregarded or just copied completely and spended elsewhere. Yeah. Or companies that just have a ton of money to spend on tokens can just copy like it's lowered the barrier. Like used to, if you're open source something big and complex, it's still so much skill in running it or understanding how it works or being part of the team that wrote it. Yes. AI has made that much less of a problem for people that want to copy.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

Totally, totally. And then but then something, you know, like a an open source project that holds up half the internet like Linux, right? Yeah, I mean, those guys are essentially employed by Meta.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

Yeah, or Meta, all the large company like their sponsorship there.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Yeah, that like LibSSR was the one that they used with the GitHub sponsors. Like you had one guy maintaining it, and it's just like critical to the functioning of the internet. Yes. Um yeah, hopeful. And then now all this like people are just sending random like pull requests full of junk.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

All right.

SPEAKER_00 23:50

Correct. I think that's annoying people on GitHub as much as the down. It's like it's it's a swirl of like culturally GitHub is in this odd place because of AI. Yep. And then with it going down and having issues, that's like is an aspirating thing.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

It's totally rough. Totally rough time. I

Who should run Github?

SPEAKER_01 24:07

think the thing to wrap on, I mean, you actually made a post. If I bring it up, I'll be able to tell you how long ago this was. It's actually only just a few days ago. Okay. April 30. You were talking about uh you mentioned if the community wants to save contemporary GitHub, we should rally around uh Kay Daigle. Yes, Mr. Kyle. Kyle Daigle. And so becoming independent CEO, he has been there since the old days, knows the soul of the product, and knows how to do it. So are you able to like expand a little bit on you know why that might actually be the case?

SPEAKER_00 24:36

I think he's been there since 2012 or 2013, built big parts of the product, stayed there for probably one of the longest tenure people. Yep. Almost certainly is one of the longest tenure people there. It was a weird company. It was a really strange time, really strange product. Lots of intangibles, like with every company, like you with every company that makes something great, there's always these odd, you know, intangible pieces to the culture that are really important. And over the years that kind of has really dissipated. Yeah. He remembers it, I know he does. And he's like lived inside the Microsoft machine long enough, and clearly he's doing really well. His communication is the only reason we know why GitHub was having these issues. Right. Like he went out on a limb and did it and spoke to the community. I think if it he could do that full time. Yeah. And that was part of his thing to do it, he could. But now Mike GitHub is layered so deep inside of Microsoft.coms a bureaucracy problem. Massively. I mean Microsoft is an amazing company. There's many get there's many revenue lines there that are way bigger and way more important to them than GitHub. I don't know, it feels like GitHub should be treated like they'd bought Wikipedia or something. You know, so like it's a bit more there's something a bit more special to it. And like clearly it's like the backlash has not been good for them. And I think I just believe he could turn it. I've known him for a very, very long time. Yes. We worked together very closely back in the day. He could do it. There's not just not many people left there that would be able to. Totally, totally. I would love to see it, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

I think we all would. Even even my ass that like barely codes anymore. I'm still pushing to GitHub.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

The message to everyone is rally around Kyle. Yes. Command it right to your local GitHub representative.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

I think it's I think it's good. I think it's good. I'm happy to I'm happy to amplify this message, you know, as a as a um Get him on, he comes to San Francisco. Totally down, totally down. I mean, you know, I think that the interesting thing for members of technical staff, if I can get him off of his sort of like comms, you know, comms locked, like very, very polished, maybe I don't know. Does he have like a cool hobby that he does? Do you know, by any chance?

SPEAKER_00 26:36

I don't know. Any cool hobbies?

SPEAKER_01 26:37

Maybe he's playing golf or something, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 26:39

I don't think Carl's a golfer. I'll ask him after this. I'm curious now what hobbies that what hobbies he does have. Totally, because I think that's always that's not like he's a cute man of the people, kind of that's that's why he could do it. He is a man of the people.

SPEAKER_01 26:50

I mean, Carl, if you if you end up seeing this, come on, come on, uh members of technical staff, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:56

Make your campaign.

SPEAKER_01 26:57

Yes, yes, yes. You'll be seen by the right people. Yeah, yeah. I promise you that. I promise you that. Well, I think that's actually a good place to wrap unless you have any closing thoughts on this whole saga.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

Very sad. Totally. We'll see how it goes.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

Totally. I couldn't agree more. Well, you've been listening to another episode of Members of Technical Stuff. We'll go ahead and see you on the timeline again real soon.