HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'
Source: Hacker News
Background
HashiCorp co‑founder Mitchell Hashimoto has decided that GitHub is so unstable it is “no longer a place for serious work,” and he will move his current project, Ghostty – a terminal emulator praised by The Register for its speed and innovative features – elsewhere.
Hashimoto has been a long‑time GitHub user, joining in February 2008 (user #1299) and using the platform almost daily. He has previously spoken positively about GitHub, describing it as the place that made him “the most happy” and noting that he even checked it during his honeymoon.
“Some people doom‑scroll social media. I’ve been doom‑scrolling GitHub issues since before that was a word… I like this.”
Growing Frustration
Recently, Hashimoto’s sentiment has shifted dramatically.
“I’ve been angry about it. I’ve hurt people’s feelings. I’ve been lashing out. Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is irrationally personal.”
The primary cause of his frustration is the frequency of service outages. Over the past month, he kept a journal marking an “X” on every day a GitHub outage impacted his work. On the day of his post, a GitHub Actions outage prevented him from reviewing pull requests for about two hours.
He wrote his post a few days before an April 28 incident that caused pull‑request failures due to an Elasticsearch issue. Incidents like these have led him to conclude that GitHub “is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.”
“I want to ship software and it doesn’t want me to ship software.”
Decision to Move
Hashimoto announced that after 18 years he will migrate Ghostty to another collaborative code host. He is keeping a read‑only mirror of Ghostty on GitHub and retaining his personal projects there for now, but the active development will shift elsewhere.
“We have a plan but I’m also very much still in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS). It’ll take us time to remove all of our dependencies on GitHub and we have a plan in place to do it as incrementally as possible.”
He remains open to returning to GitHub if the service delivers “real results and improvements, not words and promises.”
Context
Since Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, some developers feared the platform would become more “Redmond‑centric,” potentially alienating users not tied to Windows or Azure. While many of those concerns proved unfounded, Hashimoto’s experience suggests that the platform’s reliability is now a significant issue, coinciding with broader challenges Microsoft faces around quality and AI integration.
Related Articles
- Microsoft’s GitHub shifts to metered AI billing amid cost crisis
- Ongoing supply‑chain attack ‘explicitly targeting’ security, dev tools
- GitHub opts all CLI users into telemetry collection whether they want it or not
- Microsoft’s GitHub grounds Copilot account sign‑ups amid capacity crunch
- Windows has serious quality problems, Microsoft admits