Why aren’t people moving away from Github? There’s Codeberg, Gitlab, and radicle. What’s holding them back?
LLMs have made it so that it takes longer to determine whether content is bad than it takes to make bad content. The solution SHOULD be to demand that people examine the content themselves and turn it into high-quality content, but that’s not going to happen so long as it is possible for anyone to submit pull requests. The only solution that will actually work is to restrict who is allowed to submit content to your projects.
So many things are ruined when friction is completely removed.
Meaningful friction my beloved
I wonder how many of these folks just don’t know about the alternatives. I’ve come across otherwise capable developers who think git and GitHub are the same thing. People come to software from all sorts of backgrounds so I can’t blame anyone for not knowing.
I also imagine that if people are aware, the activation energy of switching is too high. It’s more than just setting a new remote and pushing. You have to learn the new system, maybe migrate tickets, wrestle with CI, etc. For a hobby project it’s probably easier to shut it down and just go do something else. I also don’t blame them here. There’s more to life than open source, and its amazing people are able to contribute when they can.
A lot of people study CS or programming because they have been told it would make them a lot of money. If you just want to make money and don’t care about anything else you’re always just going to put in the minimum effort required, so I’m not surprised people just can’t be bothered to switch.
I am pretty strict on my standards but every day I spend jobless I dissappoint my family and green squares on github are the main thing recruiters look at.
On the bright side I found out if you change date in linux and commit, the green squares will fill in retroactively.
May or may not write a script.
You might want to look into
git commit --date
Even projects on other repo systems have shut down. Too many AI submissions for them. LLMs are integrated so deeply into certain IDEs that some developers I’ve seen literally did not know they were using them (no, they couldn’t tell me why they thought writing a prompt in the IDE wasn’t hitting an LLM).
It’s a systemic issue that GitHub exacerbates but it’s by no means limited to it.
I can see people not realizing the LLM autocomplete was an LLM. But not the prompting.
And even then, that’s some fancy ass autocomplete if it’s not LLM powered…
I hope this is a good question:
What happens in a couple years when all this code that’s been written by Copilot and the like, Microsoft then turns around and says, “OH YEAH, BTW THAT WAS GENERATED BY OUR AI SO NOW WE OWN YOUR APP!” Look, most social media ToS says anything uploaded to their sites is owned by them now, royalties-free.
Right now it’s no big deal to any AI company because more code means more training for the AI, but will we get to the point that they’re happy with code output enough and then turn around claiming they own those? Plus, any successful apps are then basically free/no cost contributed projects?
Bonus: Also, what happens when AI is trained on AI-written code that was initially wrong by AI? Is the system doomed to never really improve because of so many inaccuracies?
That is an excellent question and I wouldn’t put it past them. Only time will tell.
They are already throwing a fit because Chinese companies are distilling their models, so them trying to copyright their copyright infringement machines is definitely plausible. And with a US system as it exists today, it might very well work. Hopefully the rest of the world will have told the US to fuck off by then…
How moving to other source control systems would help? People can still generate code via LLMs and submit changes for review
Microslop has an editor in Github that makes it dead easy to create PRs with Copilot. It’s very low friction. On another platform, you have to download the editor first and install some agentic coding plugin (or download an agentic editor) and pay for it to get started. Much more friction.
Less popular, less traffic - double edged sword.
