Alex Hyett

Posted on Jun 29 • Originally published at alexhyett.com on May 10

GitHub is dead, What's next?

#github #git #selfhosting

I moved all of my projects off of GitHub back in August, but I still have to use GitHub for work, unfortunately.

You can see my contribution graph for the last year which is completely empty Friday - Sunday (4-day work week!). It is not that I don't do any coding at the weekends, but the code is all on my private server.

I chose to move my work off of GitHub due to the team becoming part of the Microsoft CoreAI team. I knew then it was only going to be a matter of time until GitHub was vibe coded into the ground.

In the last 6 months using GitHub just for work, there have been more than one occasion where I have been unable to complete my work due to problems with GitHub. Everything from pull requests not working, GitHub actions failing or just multiple pages on the site not loading.

GitHub is no longer a tool for professionals. #

GitHub's Enterprise SLA promise is the three-nines, 99.9% uptime. GitHub have tried to cover up how poorly they are performing by removing the aggregated uptime of all their services from their status page. There have been a lot of occasions of GitHub having issues and not reporting it. Even with those omissions, most of their services are below 99.7% uptime.

The only exceptions are Pages (99.95%) and Packages (99.97%), so static files , and even they aren't up 100% of the time.

If you want to see the true picture of GitHub's uptime there is a community run page called The Missing GitHub Status Page which shows that their actual aggregated uptime is a shocking 84.35%!

There is a nice graph showing exactly why this is:

Basically, everything went down hill when Microsoft acquired GitHub.

OK so uptime is a bit rubbish, but at least it is still a reliable git service, right? Right?

They can't even get the basics right meanwhile using your code to train their AI models.

Developers aren't happy myself included and many are finding new homes for their projects:

Where to move to? #

The obvious choice for open source projects is to move to Codeberg. This is where the majority of projects have moved to. I have my public repositories mirrored here as well: Alex Hyett - Codeberg.org.

Codeberg however doesn't like you to have too many closed source projects, as it mainly meant for FOSS software. Codeberg however is based on ForgeJo which you can host yourself.

I have my own private ForgeJo instance which hosted on my home server. My home server is just an old Dell Wyze 5070 running Debian.

I have another public server over at git.alexhyett.com which is running on a Hetzner box.

If you don't want all the hassle of running your own server, the quickest way to get one running is to use Railway. This is what I used when I first started as they have a free Hobby plan which gives you $5 a month in usage. Enough to cover most, if not all the costs of running a ForgeJo instance.

To get started:

Sign up to Railway (or use my affiliate link to get an extra $20 in credits)
Use the ForgeJo template and click Deploy Now.
Follow the instructions to set up an admin user. I would advise disabling registration.
All done!

If you have your own domain you can set up a git.yourdomain.com redirect, but you don't have to.

ForgeJo makes it really simple to migrate your projects from GitHub. It is a bit tedious to do one at a time, but it can be scripted.

Then next time GitHub is inevitably down you can smile smugly.

❤️ Picks of the Week #

I thought I would try a different layout this week and sort the links into categories so they are easier to scan and find what you are interested in. Over the next few months I will try to converge on a set list of categories.

🤖 AI & LLMs

Where the goblins came from - At this point it does feel like we are pleading with a child not to do something.

AI & Alignment - We can produce code faster, but that isn't what makes great software. Understanding the problem and communicating is still more important than writing code.

Kimi K2.6 just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a coding challenge - I have used Kimi for personal projects, and it can definitely be used instead of Claude in places. If you aren't vibe coding and giving it set tasks it does pretty well.

Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like - I am still fairly hands-on when I am coding with an agentic. Creating a ticket and getting a bunch of agents to do it for you still feels like vibe coding to me. I like to keep the amount of code I need to review to a minimum.

Agentic Coding Is a Trap - If you don't use your coding skills they will eventually whither and die. Even if you have to use agents for coding at work you should still and try to do some “artisanal coding” in your own time if you can.

Swatch Did What? (AI slop) - I have a Swatch watch which I wear most days. This is just gross.

The Pulse: Tokenmaxxing as a weird new trend - This does seem like a weird flex. I get AI can be useful but “burning” tokens to get to the top of a leaderboard is just nuts.

The Pulse: token spend breaks budgets, what next? - I thought it was just the big FAANG companies that were spending ridiculous amounts, but it seems to be everywhere, unfortunately.

Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish - Personal projects that are for your benefit only, by all means vibe code. Hopefully it will only be you that it affects.

HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing - Anthropic is really trying to push out anyone trying to use their subscriptions for anything other than Claude.

Apple accidentally left Claude.md files in Apple Support app - It is not that surprising that Apple is using AI internally to build their products. I mean, come on have you seen the latest Mac release. You don't get inconsistent corners with well thought out design!

Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months - Wow $2,000 per month, per engineer is crazy. I get that $24k is less than the cost of another developer but still!

VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage - First they help you, then they take credit.

Programming Still Sucks - Every company seems to have a cron job that is doing most of the heavy lifting of the company and no-one is around who understands it.

💻 Dev Tools & Coding

From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth - I am sure I have mentioned Better Auth before. It does look like a good and free option for authentication.

Red Squares — GitHub outages as contributions - Why not! It does look pretty bad when it is all red like this.

A desktop made for one - I wonder whether the time it takes to build all these yourself is worth it?

🎨 Design & UX

Laws of UX - With more developers expected to just use AI for the frontend we might need to use this as a reference.

🔒 Privacy & Security

LinkedIn scans for 6,278 extensions and encrypts the results into every request - Just why! I hate that I have to keep my LinkedIn account if I ever want a job in the future.

Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac - I saw Notepad++ for Mac come up on another site and nearly linked to it. I am not saying this vibe coded Mac version contains malware but who knows!

🏢 Tech Industry & Business

Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs - More layoffs!

Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14% - And some more. Who wants to learn carpentry and farming?

Ask.com has closed - Bye bye Jeeves. Given a lot of people are moving to AI for search I feel they so could have revived this. Who doesn't want a slightly sarcastic British butler giving them search results.

X is a Cesspit - I left Twitter a long time ago. I am always surprised by friends, colleagues and otherwise intelligent people who are still on there.

🎮 Gaming

Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license - Now you can print out a controller and pretend you are playing with your new Steam Machine! Although I heard a rumour that Valve took a big delivery that could be them!!

🧠 Miscellaneous

Cal Newport's anti-brain rot rules - This is good advice. For me: