The corporate branding, the new “AI-powered developer platform” slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as “GitHub”—the traditional website, what are to me the core features—simply isn’t Microsoft’s priority at this point in time.
Microsoft software is all like this: the features users want and would find most useful are never a priority, nor are the bugs that annoy existing users. The priority is whatever some unholy alliance of management and marketing have pulled out of their corporate bottoms as the focus of this month's promotion. It doesn't seem even to be about what would drive sales, since customers like things that work. It's some logic that only makes sense to the businesspeople who speak that absolutely vapid buzzword slurry that gushes from Satya Nadella's mouth. I don't get it, but it's very consistent with Microsoft.
They want to make stuff that look good in the quarterly earnings report. They want to show they’re fully committed to AI in all their products or whatever.
They don’t want satisfied customers. They want satisfied investors.
The same thing happens at Amazon. First they screwed up the product search by treating the user's query as a suggestion rather than as a requirement. Now reports are coming out saying that the search bar has been replaced by an AI prompt with very badly summarized and often wrong results.
M$‘s priority is to draw new people on their products and make people upgrade to higher tiers. Existing users are none of their concern. There are business models who will put the product team to focus on existing users. One way is an open source product run by the users community, another way is product relying on the effect of word of mouth.
I don't know what's happening at github, but even the tree page rendering is annoyingly slow now. I wish they stopped ruining a working product by bloating it up with unnecessary 'features'.
It was bought by Microsoft and all efforts are going towards AI shit. Once they have your subscriptions to copilot, windows, github, etc, they dont give a fuck about making anything easier for you
Hey now. A lot of that effort has been poured into turning a code forge into a corpo social media platform like Microsoft LinkedIn as well as a way to siphon out a percent chunk of donations via Sponsors too.
I can understand why it excites you. But I'm old enough to recognize that if you cede control of your offline tools like IDE to them, they will eventually exploit it to make money by ruining your day. I'm perfectly happy sacrificing a bit of convenience to protect myself against rent seeking in the future.
Honestly in this day and age where everything runs inside containers, you should be able to do that in your home server. Distrobox proves it. Even a good alternative to vscode exists - theia by eclipse - that's designed to do exactly this.
The problem wasn’t that the line I wanted wasn’t on the page—it’s that the whole document wasn’t being rendered at once, so my browser’s builtin search bar just couldn’t find it.
I feel like this has been the case for a while now. Luckily they offer other search tools so its a gotcha that you only have to hit once.
In edit mode they capture the crtl-f keystrokes and offer their own search and replace tool. An argument could be made that they should offer a custom search tool for read mode if they are going to break the browsers built in tooling.
Whenever I encounter a project that is not hosted on GitHub, such as https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot I get totally delighted because navigating and browsing it actually works.
In GitHub if I am browsing the source code I now have to open it in a raw page without highlighting, because GitHub’s features absolutely gunk it up. I have no intention of ever putting a new project on GitHub again. Bad user experience, untrustworthy leadership, and bad values (I.e. Silicon Valley ones)
I want to see good forges for alternative DVCSs. Git itself feels like legacy software full a truckload of arcane commands & flags with bad defaults that just keeps bloating. Most software makers at this point have never even used a non-Git VCS.