GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out.

Daily reminder that Codeberg is always the good alternative to corporate bastards like this idiot

i'm also looking forward for https://sourcehut.org/

Contradictory to the title, this message is not to the developers, developers don't care what github ceo thinks, and they should know it. This might be for the management of other companies to allow using ai or force ai usage.

Threatening remarks like that are why I learned PHPUnit and XDebug, and yeah it made me become a better developer, but often times these are just empty statements.

AI is just another tool in my toolbox, but it's not everything.

Unit testing and TDD are awesome; but if you can avoid it: Don't write things in PHP (unless it's for work).
- I've written a few personal projects in Laravel too, I don't mind modern PHP tbh. It's good for spinning up web apps quickly.

I don't get it. AI is a tool. My CEO didn't care about what tools I use, as long as I got the job done. Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done? They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.

Because unlike with the other tools you use the CEO of your company is investing millions of dollars into AI and they want a big return on their investment.
- Return? No, there is no return on investment from AI. If there really was a return to be had from Devs, you wouldn't have to force them to use it.
  This is a saving face and covering their asses exercise. Option 1 is "We spent the money, nobody's using it, the bubbles gonna burst", the other choice is "if we can ramp up the usage numbers before the earnings call, we can get some of that sweet investor money to buy us out of being mauled by our shareholders".
  It's shitty management, making shitty decisions to cover up their previous shitty decisions
I think part of it is because they think they can train models off developers, then replace them with models. The other is that the company is heavily invested in coding LLMs and the tooling for them, so they are trying to hype them up.
Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done?
Not just that... why do they have to threat and push for people to use a tool that allegedly is fantastic and makes everything better and faster?... the answer is that it does not work but they need to pump the numbers to keep the bubble going
GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft is forcing AI on all the employees
- They all need to be sued for unethical “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish” practices again
- Honestly I've been recommending setting up a personal git store and cloning any project you like, I imagine the next phase of this is Microsoft making a claim that if Copilot 'assisted' all these projects, Microsoft is a part owner of all these projects - in a gambit to swallow and own open source.
- I am surprised they aren't embracing it... I would. You immediately get some vague non person to blame all your failures on.
  Employers aren't loyal enough for the average person to care about their companies well being.
It's not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It's about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.
If AI actually accomplishes what it's being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.
tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care
- Alternatively, following their logic, keep the number of people and achieve massively higher productivity. But they don't want that, they want to reduce the number of people having opinions and diluting the share pool, because its not about productivity, its about exerting control.
They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
Accurate description of most managers i've encountered.
Because they make money selling you the AI. It's that simple.
They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
AI make money line go up. It's not clueless, he's trying to sell a kind of snake oil (ok, not "snake oil", I don't think AI is entirely bad).
- Snake oil is also not entirely bad. The placebo effect actually works.

such an easy choice ......

(edit: I followed up and got out. This too is now self-hosted and codeberg when needed)

I'm a professional developer and have tested AI tools extensively over the last few years as they develop. The economic implications of the advancements made over the last few months are simply impossible to ignore. The tools aren't perfect, and you certainly need to structure their use around their strengths and weaknesses, but assigned to the right tasks they can be 10% or less of the cost with better results. I've yet to have a project where I've used them and they didn't need an experienced engineer to jump in and research an obscure or complex bug, have a dumb architectural choice rejected, or verify if stuff actually works (they like reporting success when they shouldn't), but again the economics; the dev can be doing other stuff 90% of the time.

Don't get me wrong, on the current trajectory this tech would probably lead to deeply terrible socioeconomic outcomes, probably techno neofeudalism, but for an individual developer putting food on the table I don't see it as much of a choice. It's like the industrial revolution again, but for cognitive work.

I keep hearing stuff like this, but I haven't found a good use or workflow for AI (other than occasional chatbot sessions). Regular autocomplete is more accurate (no hallucinations) and faster than AI suggestions (especially accounting for needing to constantly review the suggestions for correctness). I guess stuff like Cursor is OK at making one-off tools on very small code-bases, but hits a brick-wall when the code base gets too big. Then you're left with a bunch of unmaintainable code you're not very familiar with and you would to spend a lot of time trying to fix yourself. Dunno if I'm doing something wrong or what.
I guess what I'm saying is that using AI can speed you up to a point while the project accumulates massive amounts of technical debt, and when you take into account all the refactoring and debugging time, it results in taking longer to produce a buggier project. At least, in my experience.
- I've used it most extensively doing Ruby on Rails greenfield apps, and also some JS front ends, some Python mid sized apps, and some Rust and Nix utilities. You're absolutely right about it struggling with code base scale, I had to rework the design process around this. Essentially, design documentation telling the story, workflow documentation describing in detail every possible functionality, and an iteration schedule. So the why, what, and how formalized and in detail, in that order. It can generate the bulk of those documents given high level explanations, but require humans to edit them before making them the 'golden' references. Test driven development is beyond critical, telling it everywhere to use it extensively with writing failing tests first seems to work best.
  So to actually have it do a thing I load those documents into context, give it a set unit of work from the iteration schedule, and work on something else.
  It does go down some seriously wrong paths sometimes, like writing hacky work arounds if it incorrectly diagnosing some obscure problem. I've had a few near misses where it tried to sneak in stuff that would bury future work in technical debt. Most problematic is it's just subtle enough that a junior dev might miss it; they'd probably get sent down a rabbit hole with several layers of spaghetti obscuring the problem.
- That's perfect for higher ups. They don't care if what you release has bugs as long as you work on them when they pop up, they consider that part of your job. They want a result quickly and will accept 85% if it moves the needle forward.
  These people don't care about technical debt, they don't care about exploits until it happens to them, then it's how bad and how long to fix. No one cares about doxxes anymore, it's just the cost of doing business. Like recalls.
  This is perfect for CEOs and billionaires because they don't care how something is done at a 35,000 foot view, they just want it now. AI is a nightmare of exploits that haven't even begun to be discovered yet. Things that will be easily exploitable, especially by other algorithms.
  Coders are just as effected by supply and demand, and the demand is for AI products.
I'm finding AI effectively automates entry level jobs and interns. The long term implications is very few will be able to enter the field. What do we do when all the experienced engineers retire? How will we shift our economy to work for everyone under this model?
- Forward-thinking has never been capitalism's strong suit.
- Can you give an example of what those entry level jobs may be? Because I have yet to encounter a position where an AI would be as smart as an entry level person.

Expectation: High quality code done quickly by AI.

Reality: Low quality AI generated bug reports being spammed in the hopes the spammers can get bug bounty for fixing them, with AI of course.

Two words: good fucking luck!

Error: Buffer overflow.

I asked an AI to generate me some code yesterday. A simple interface to a REST API with about 6 endpoints.

And the code it made almost worked. A few fixes here and there to methods it pulled out of it's arse, but were close enough to real ones to be an easy fix.

But the REST API it made code for wasn't the one I gave it. Bore no resemblance to it in fact.

People need to realise that MS isn't forcing it's devs to write all code with AI because they want better code. It's because they desperately need training data so they can sell their slop generators to gullible CEOs.

Message to Github CEO: your job is one thing AI is best at.

does "embracing AI" means replacing all these execs with it? or is it "too far"?

No, they’re all super special and have an “instinct” that a robot could never have. Of course the same does not go for artists or anyone who does the actual work for these “titans of industry”.
*by “instinct” we, of course, mean survivorship bias based on what is essentially gambling, exploitation, and being too big to fail.

"Managing agents to achieve outcomes may sound unfulfilling to many"

No shit, man.

it's also sort of a description of his own role, innit?

Does github copilot include attributions and licenses from projects it copy paste code from or it's just stealing and pretending like nothing happened like all other AI ?

Is his message: “let us scrape your code or go away, and we gonna scrape it anyway” note: scrape = steal

real messages: embrace AI, because i still need to grift from investor's money, because AI is just a hype"

This part really stuck out for me:

This is the latest example of a strange marketing strategy by AI companies. Instead of selling products based on helpful features and letting users decide, executives often deploy scare tactics that essentially warn people they will become obsolete if they don't get on the AI bandwagon.

If hype doesn't work, try threats!

Threats work well for scams. People who couldn't be bothered to move by promises of something new and better can be motivated by fear of losing what they already have.
It's really unfortunate psychology is looked down upon and psychologists are viewed as some "soft" profession. Zuck is a psychology major. It's been 2 decades, most of the radical changes in which were not radical in anything other than approach to human psychology.
BTW, I've learned recently that in their few initial years Khmer Rouge were not known as communist organization to even many of their members. Just an "organization". Their rhetoric was agrarian (of course peasants are hard-working virtuous people, and from peasantry working the earth comes all the wisdom, and those corrupt and immoral people in the cities should be made work to eat), Buddhist (of course the monk-feudal system of obedience, work and ascese is the virtuous way to live, though of course we are having a rebirth now so we are even wiser), monarchist (they referred to Sihanouk's authority almost to the end), anti-Vietnamese (that's like Jewish for German Nazis, Vietnamese are the evil). And after them taking power for some time they still didn't communicate anything communist. They didn't even introduce their leadership. Nobody knew who makes the decisions in that "organization" or how it was structured. It didn't have a face. They only officially made themselves visible as Democratic Kampuchea with communism and actual leaders when the Chinese pressured them. They didn't need to, because they were obeyed via threat (and lots of fulfillment) of violence anyway.
This is important in the sense that when you have the power, you don't need to officially tell the people over which you have it that you rule them.
So - in these 2 decades it has also came into fashion to deliberately stubbornly ignore the fact that psychology works over masses. And everybody acts as if when there's no technical means to make people do something, then it's not likely or possible.
- You don’t have to influence a populace. Just purchase a subgroup willing to do violence on the populace.
Which is how you know they have a good product that they have full faith in.
when they have to blackmail, threaten, coerce, and force people to accept their product.
For some odd reason, this calls to mind an emotionally immature parent trying to get their toddler to eat vegetables... no reason at all...
- Just that the vegetables in this case are actually fastfood and gummibears.
"The Sky Is Falling! Buy My Magic Umbrella!" is a classic hypeman's trick.
- From Java beans(TM) to Magic Beans.
The code reviews will continue until morale improves.

I don’t trust Copilot to make basic suggestions, let alone edits, on an html file.

I have a lot of projects, many OSS and some private. I self host forgejo for my private stuff and also have a lot of my oss there.

Still, I currently use GitHub as my main git service, since it's the most polished code forge and their ci servers are free and fast as fuck. The only other thing keeping me there is the network effect in the sense that I like my projects to be more discoverable, not that anyone gives a shit about my code besides a few friends and randos.

If they get annoying, it's trivial to move. I got the infrastructure set up, and forgejo federation is coming.

Funny thing to say after using their code to train the shitty-ass AI. Developers don't need AI, but AI certainly needs developers.

AI also needs a lot of other shit to run even at a basic level. Networks, and systems... A dedicated nuclear power facility on three Mile Island.
AI can't run without so many people plugging in the servers, and power, and installing the operating systems... The list of supporting characters is long.
What if we.... Just.... Stopped supporting the companies that were pushing AI?

I got stuck today in a part of my workplace where they have one of the local shitty radio stations playing, couldn't have my headphones in as people kept coming up and talking to me, and a shitty pop music mashup plays and it struck me, this is AI.

To clarify there is some shitty artist who gets the credit, but its just a selection of clips crossfaded and slightly processed into each other to make a new "song" out of a dozen pop songs. No actual creativity, no new material, just a quasi algorithmic blending of songs so that some soulless talentless grifter can claim they are an artist.

It gets deeper though, as mixed in there are songs that couldn't actually be performed live and acoustic due to the amount of sound engineering and vocal processing that went into the original versions of these songs.

The whole thing is turning into an Ouroboros, they have worked out how to make perfectly bland, meaningless music and now the snake is eating its tail as the industry consumes that slop to manufacture more slop.

Yet deeper, why does this beige bullshit get air time... Why its our old friend capitalist market forces, no one passionate about music wants to make this shit, its the people who want the fame and money and view music as the means to that end.

We know that AI makes people dumber, we know that it leads to the atrophy of skill and talent, and we know the only motivation for its use is capitalist. AI is pop music.

For what its worth I used italics on AI as I categorically refuse to believe this garbage is actually artificial intelligence. I am reasonably certain that actual artificial intelligence is the next fusion power, it's going to be "only a few years away" from being viable until well after I die, but its just too good a marketing term to leave it alone while we make do with these stunted chinese rooms.

Wow that rant blew up.

Your point about music is a great analogy. Basically:
People play music and people enjoy listening to music.
Businessman inserts himself between the musician and the audience to “deliver the music”.
Businessman charges listeners huge money to deliver music, gives no money to musicians.
Businessman the decides to replace the musician with a robot (e.g. “AI”)
Businessman explodes market. Listeners leave. Businessman gets bailout from government.
- See I also think that there is something to be said about how there's people still out there making new music, performing it, recording. But business has captured the market and is drowning out the smaller players. The signal to noise ratio gets so skewed that even if the best song you never heard is only a web search away you may never listen to it because your streaming service will never play it. But the soulless corporate remix of a remix of a cover of a song from the 80s, you hear that 4 times a day because they have a marketing budget and algorithmic influence.
Tell me you've never written a song without telling me you've never written a song...
- Maybe I am misreading your comment here, but I am going to take it on face value, I have never written a song. In an interesting note I believe cutting pages out of a bunch of books and sticking them together in a new binding wouldn't make a compelling read, I also have never written a novel.
  I seriously respect people who can write songs, I would imagine they have or had passion for the art. I seriously doubt any song writer is out there thinking "Holy fuck this song is amazing, I really hope some shithead producer crops the chorus and mashes it together with a bunch of other tracks to make it completely meaningless. That would make it perfect.'
Yep, autotune rappers have been pushed for years, and I always suspected it's to make the transition to AI music easier.
Ahh down votes in lieu of a substantive argument. Love it. If there wasn't a thread to pull on in all that word salad that would unravel the tapestry do you think maybe there's something to my take on this matter?
Anyway, don't care, this isn't Reddit so a downvote doesn't mean shit, and you at least read some of my post. To quote a somewhat famous Doctor "Don't you think she looks tired?"

I've always hated GitHub glad to see it finally is going to crumble

Get out or what? GitHub?

I don’t understand this insistence that all developers must use AI.

If AI made a developer better, why insist, wouldn’t the vibe coders outcompete all others?

Wouldn’t they need non AI coders to train things?

Or is it because this snake oil pitch only works when everyone does it so no one notices it’s detrimental effects?

Studies show AI coding tools make the task slower. It only makes people feel they're faster, but reality is different. So it's the snake oil pitch. Nobody can know it doesn't really work and they keep throwing money at it in an increasingly more desperate "fake it till you make it". Because, if this thing implodes, it'll take a large part of the market and economy with it to do a rerun of the 2008 financial crisis.
- Can you name or link the studies? I’d love to read more abt this
It's because we're expensive. That's the long and short of it.
10 developers in Silicon Valley can run you $1-$2m in salary alone (it's more expensive with benefits added).
The industry constantly conspires to keep the salary of software engineers down. It does it cyclically too. In 2008 I was told I would have no problem getting a 6 figure job when I graduated by 2013. Of course the economy had other ideas. Same thing with the dot Com bubble.
I currently make double what I did 10 years ago. It doesn't actually matter much as inflation and a divorce has had my costs balloon just as much, but it's still loads more than any other job out there.
They'll get what they want, one way or another. Then when none of their shit works they inevitably come back begging us and we request better pay and benefits again, because we know they do this. They don't learn, much like those reliant on AI.
- 10 engineers in the Bay Area would easily be 2-3 million without additional benefits or support personnel

GitHub is being pushy? Fucking GitHub?

Should we tell him git doesn’t actually need GitHub? That it existed just fine before it and will continue to exist after it?

Ima tell him…

At some previous jobs, the newer devs would sometimes confuse the two. Its a real thing.
Me I lived through svn, mercerial, and file vault. So glad we ended up with git as the protocol.
Hell you can set up a git + file server and just use it without any Hub (Hob/lab/berg) if your bare metal enough. It works.
- You can literally run a single command to setup a remote git repository on a server that has ssh.
- The Linux kernel still works off emailing patches. If such a large project doesn't need a central repo, you don't either.
  I use self-hosted Forgejo because it's convenient, that's it.
- I mean I would've preferred Hg.
  But to the point, I think GitHub has been instrumental in the success of Git.
Sadly a lot of us are stuck with GitHub. Enterprise loves it because it has "Metrics", and most companies aren't about to jump ship over something like AI — especially when so many of them are already doubling down on AI in other areas.

And now we understand why MSFT buying github a some years back was a really big deal actually, and not just some kind of mostly neutral, generic expansionary business move.

Yes, this isn't just about profits for these companies.
It's about control. They want to prove that they own us, and they're right more often than not because of useful idiots.

It's funny how so many people make big businesses and think they are the GOAT when in reality the true GOAT is Linus Torvalds.

Also remember that Torvalds invented Git and gave it away for free. The Corps are stealing the free software and leveraging it to force everyone to give them money instead.
The Github CEO didn't even "make" the big business. He was appointed by Microsoft after they purchased it and their first pick for CEO of Github resigned after 2 years.
Agreed. And he is very humble about it in interviews.

CEOs, embrace torches and pitchforks.

Copilot is shit.

I'm looking out in the street. I see a lack of torches, pitchforks, or any pressure on corporate interests.
- Don't worry, they're gonna eat themselves doing shit just like this. It's not a matter of if, but when.
  "AI" has it's uses (medicine, engineering, etc.), but 99.99% of the snake oil they're selling are just gimmicky cash grabs. Classic cases of Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
  Let them burn their money, I say. Fuck it. Just sit back and enjoy the fire.
- Be the change you want to see.
- Be patient. Pyrrhic victories of your enemies are not to be gobbled. They are to be savoured.
- You can't point this out! People will flip the responsibility to you!
Copilot is shit.
Exactly, my company provides license for copilot and I use it, and while it has some highlights most of the time it actually is more a nuisance than help.
It especially annoys me because it hijacks autocomplete based on types with is own that frequently has subtle bugs, so now if I have it enabled I need to be on guard all the time. With the traditional autocomplete I could just trust it to be correct.
- Turn off the autocomplete, it’s shit. Do use agent mode for targeted tasks that are easy but laborious. Don’t give open ended or subjective prompts. Don’t ask it to do anything creative or novel. It has its uses. Nowhere near what the snake oil salesmen would have you believe, and probably not worth the unsubsidized cost, but for now it has uses.
- This is my experience. It saves a bit of typing sometimes but that's probably cancelled out by the time spent correcting it, rewriting nonsense it produced, and reviewing my corworkers PRs that didn't notice the nonsense.
- You can turn off the copilot autocomplete in the ide and JUST use agent/edit/ask mode
- i wonder if this the reason why its so bad on the phones, it autocomplete with words that arnt even close to what you are typing.
- You have to put it in Ask mode so it doesn’t touch your code also ChatGPT models are free so if you want to ring up an AI bill use the Claude and Sonnet models.
Copilot is shit
Yes and no. I find its terrible at solving more complex problems but its great at writing out tests for a function/view that covers every flow. My team went from having like 40% (shit) coverage to every PR having every case tested (inb4 they're not good tests, they are good)
With that being said, fuck CEOs and fuck AI. At least you could (mostly) escape the blockchain hype

Oh I'm already out, but only of your shitty products.

He probably spent millions of his owe money on AI stocks.

Considering he's a Microsoft employee and Microsoft is leaning hard into the AI craze? His stock options are all dependent on this lol
This makes me want it to fail harder.

Already done. I moved everything to Codeberg a year or two ago. I strongly recommend it to anyone looking for safe, non-corporate, community-oriented version control. It’s also German and non-profit.

i urge people do do this but also donate to them too <3
Some CEO: gasp GUYS I found a new blacklisted word! Quick add non-profit to the Ai-Moderation. How dare they not pay me infinitely!

Bro you are literally not necessary, not even the best at what you do. See everyone on codeberg.

Codeberg is so nice.
But who else is going to micromanage and bully the employees and strut around self-importantly doing jack shit? /s
- Replace CEOs with AI
- What employees?
Codeberg rules

Ok, we go now

I like Codeberg better anyways.

I like the idea of it; yet you can’t host private repos. I don’t want to be locked in to GitHub but as someone starting their career it’s important to show that you’re working on stuff. Hence I worry that moving away from GitHub will negatively impact my interviewing prospects.
- You can with some caveats. It has to be stuff like configs or a project you intend to make FOSS later.
  I've never had a job check my GitHub, but I could give Codeberg too.

Move to Codeberg (esp. if you're European) - but please don't forget to donate something as well. If we don't pay for actual freedom, we won't be able to keep it.

Also note that it's for open source projects only.
- The underlying software forge Codeberg uses, Forgejo, is self-hostable. I'm sure some web hosting business will get around to providing a managed hosting offering eventually.
- All projects should be.

While I don’t wish for this future, I do look forward to being one of the few that truly understands the ‘old way’ of computing like many here on Lemmy. All that knowledge I spent my youth acquiring may very well become insanely valuable in the next few decades because so many people will treat it as irrelevant.

I’ll feel a lot like this:

The future is now. The future is also ten, twenty and thirty years ago! According to GitHub's Chief Executive Idiot himself:
the skills that will matter most include system design, AI fluency, delegation, and quality assurance
Except for "AI fluency", this has been true for fucking ever. No serious work environment evaluates their developers on how quickly they can vomit code (or so I hope): the job is indeed about design, quality and working as a team in general.
Which means a tool that does not help with any of these is already not a revolution. When the tool actively makes quality worse and collaboration more complicated, I get the impression it is actually detrimental.
Mind you, I might be dead wrong. I am personally not impressed so far. It seems to be a better autocomplete, but I don't want to throw a glass of water out the window every time I press tab.

Can this guy really be considered a CEO if GitHub is a fully owned subsidiary of Microsoft?

You know Microsoft, the company that is heavily invested in OpenAI and is spending hundreds of billions to try to make AI happen?

Yes. Microsoft owns them and tells them what their goals are, but the CEO has sole flexibility.
- "Sole flexibility" to do as he's told or get sacked.
- I don't know what "sole flexibility" is, but if Microsoft owns them and tells them what their goals are, he must not have much authority.

This is [...] a strange marketing strategy by AI companies. Instead of selling products based on helpful features and letting users decide, executives often deploy scare tactics that essentially warn people they will become obsolete if they don't get on the AI bandwagon.

Very insightful for me to read this. If AI in its present state was as useful as it is advertised, it wouldn't need such apocalyptic language.

It's almost exactly the same sales strategy as crypto and nft.

Risky talking down to developers. Does the CEO not know that Git is like REALLY easy to move?!

people are so apathetic these days that ceo's feel comfortable publically saying this shit. They know there will be no major user loss.

You can always count on the ceos of smaller companies that are owned by larger mega corporations to tell it to ya straight with no bias

Especially when Microsoft said for employees AI is no longer optional.

I really don't understand CEO's obsession with AI... is it because when they give LLMs a go they feel smart and finally capable of doing the things others could do but they were too dumb to engage with, like reasonably good writing or drawing pictures?

My guess?
anthropomorphism.
People are assigning thought and specifically intent to the replies that they get from ML and LLMs. They don't realize that the model is essentially just an unchecked auto correct that uses the entirety of everything posted on the public Internet as it's basis for what to reply to a prompt, the same way your phone tries to predict what word you want to say next based on what you've typed so far.
It's just a lot bigger and more complex than the auto correct and word prediction that your phone has.
But that's it. That's all it does. It's not thinking. It's not intelligent. It has no intent. It cannot cognitively understand what it's saying or doing.
Taking to "AI" is basically having the average of all Internet content as a basis for the reply. That means it's going to make shit up, tell you to eat glue, and generally fuck around.
But most people seem to assign it human-like traits of reasoning and intent, when there isn't any. CEOs included.
My honest take, it's a bubble. Everyone sees the (seemingly) impressive things people do with AI and ask "why can't you do that?"
It's the ultimate yes man.
It will be their undoing. AIs are primed to replace the most expensive jobs first. I guess, in a way, they are training their replacement.

Would AI be better CEO's? They would cost a lot less and probably make better decisions. Just saying.

A CEO's main job is to spout bullshit, which is also AI's particular talent.
- So, yes?
- an ai is also often wrong but confidently says they're not wrong so that sounds perfect for ceos too
- A CEOs main job is to be the fall guy when the company goes fubar.
A magic 8 ball would be a better CEO. LLMs could probably pull it off fine.
I am convinced AI could replace CEO's very easily. Making decisions based on trends and lots of data is an easy use case. And if it's the wrong decision who cares? CEO's also don't take and responsibility at all. AI is also a very good lair too.
- It already has.
  They've drunk their own coolaid. They actually believe their own bullshit. They've offloaded what little thinking they used to do onto LLMs. They have them manage their schedules, summarise their emails, write their emails and speeches, and make every single decision for them.
  They're brain-dead computer operated zombies.
  The problem is that they keep getting paid absurd amounts of money for being completely useless (and that they've always been so useless that no one can tell the difference).
  I can't help but picture the business card scene from American Psycho, but they're comparing the “AI” assistants they use instead of their cards.
I just wrote elsewhere in this thread but to repeat myself: I think the real job of a CEO is to schmooze with other CEOs and rich idiots. They get funding. Everything else is pretty much a liability, and would be better handled by someone with relevant expertise.
- So the board members could replace the CEOs with AI if they desired. I guess their saving grace is it would be hard to extort, blackmail and coerce AI.

Moved from github to gitlab when it was acquired by Microsoft. Moved from gitlab to codeberg last month because I don't need a behemoth with dozens of services I never use to store my 3 shitty code files.

Broke: selfhost Forgejo (what Codeberg runs on, for those who don't know) because nobody looks at my code anyway
Woke: access my Git repo directly through SSH because I don't need any other feature anyway

If those are my two options...start looking for my projects on Codeberg I guess.

I got out when Microsoft bought it, glad I did. I don't want you training your shitty AI on my shitty code.

TIL Github has a CEO.

GitHub is the worst git platform out there, I want version control not fucking Facebook for programming

Anyway,another point for "I'm just gonna make some money in this field nd fuck right off doing something actually useful "

https://www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-the-future-all-food-will-be-cooked-in-a-microwave-and-if-you-cant-deal-with-that-then-you-need-to-get-out-of-the-kitchen/

chef's kiss
Let me microwave your steak with a fork in it. Please watch closely as it operates.
This is genuinely such a good analogy

Guy who runs waning AI service (Copilot, currently being eaten by Claude Code and Qwen Coder) says use his AI service or you’ll be out of a job.

Github Copilot is so god awful. you'd think having access to millions of repos the thing could actually learn something.
- It’s still okay for boilerplate but is now woefully behind.
  I have it through my work and I don’t even use it, bit when I do it’s asking another provider anyway.

I already got out in March when github decided to close my account because I didn't want to involve my phone with my github account.

Codeberg has been a much more pleasant experience.

Keep inflating that bubble boys.

bubble boys
I love that. Gonna steal it.

I hate to say it, but this is going to be so much worse than cloud everything when it all comes crashing down.

Because people won't have AI to help them do anything. For some reason I get that's kind of the idea.

Dear all governments:

Ban AI. Completely.

Love,

Intelligent people

Ban AI. Completely.
That is really short sighted. We all know it is not AI. The marketing is such bullshit.
But we also know that predictive algorithms can be useful. For instance: digitizing a property line, or identifying features in a lidar cloud, or discovering anomalies in blood cells. Then there are prediction tests and what if scenarios.
Seems like this is the same argument people had about computers in general. Ban all computers they said. Who knows maybe this guy in 1968 was right all along. and computers are the problem.
- This is the 'not all men' of AI.
  We know that there are use cases but with the massive prevalence of LLMs and image generators being forced into everything we don't need to list the exclusions every single time.
- Hey moron, computers by themselves aren't oftem dangerously wrong and do not severely impact our environmemt with every brain-dead query. Not to mention horribly violate copyright.
  I swear to fuck, every time some horrible technology comes along, there are people like you who compare wanting it thrown away with being a complete luddite. It shows your horrible bias and either blind devotion to mega-corporations or your affiliation with one (or more).
  Either way: be silent. AI must be destroyed.
Dear intelligent people:
Fuck you
DJT and the entirety of the Republican party

Aight Imma head out

I am embracing AI. For better or worse, it's here to stay. The issue with the current AI models is that they are over-hyped. It would just lead to a bubble burst like had happened with dotcom. The full capability of AI will probably improve in ten or fifteen years.

Is it, though? AI has been around to stay for 20 years. The difference really is that a bunch of tech bros are worshiping it while trade rags talk it up.
- The previous iterations of LLMs is not even that close enough to be called AI unlike the current ones we have right now. In many years to come, the AI will improve.
I'll agree that it's here to stay, but not so sure it's going to obviously improve. I have had access to various LLMs and while they are useful, they are very obviously limited and have kind of been at that level for a while now. Feel like they've largely gotten as "capable" as the strategy is going to get, and now the game is on to make some things friendlier for LLM consumption to get that capability more usefully available.
At least in the context of coding.
Same, but I still don't find it particularly useful. It does help in the research phase and maybe bootstrapping, but not as much for regular development.
I use it where it makes sense, but it's certainly over-hyped.

Damn, Microsoft rolling out the "Fuck You" hits lately. Allowing hate speech against Transgender people on LinkedIn, and now this shit on Github, not even mentioning the absolute bullshit their Desktop is these days.

Never been a better time to be eying alternatives. Fuck you Github CEO, fuck you LinkedIn, fuck you Microsoft, and fuck you Satya Nadella! 🖕🖕🖕🖕

Don't forget they are committed to assisting Israel commit genocide in Gaza.

They are so desperate to push this and it's pretty obvious why. Companies have dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into AI like it was going to revolutionize literally everything and are now forcing it on people to make up for the fact that they were wrong. Don't get me wrong, AI has its uses, but their whole "solution for everything" mentality is really starting to backfire and they are just trying to make a profit off their investments. Basically "we spent way more money on this than we should have so you better use it or else."

Edit: In addition, every company is trying to be the one that's on top when the bubble pops which is only making it bigger and last longer which will only make it worse when it does actually pop. It's a problem they created and are sustaining themselves, and if they back out now it could be just as catastrophic as letting the bubble pop.

Don’t get me wrong, AI has its uses, but their whole “solution for everything” mentality
They are trying to somehow undo or redo personal computers.
To create a non-transparent tool that replaces the need (and thus social possibility) to have a universal machine.
The difference between thinking robots and computers as we have them is that thinking robots take some place in the social hierarchy, and computers help everyone who has a computer and uses it.
Science fiction usually portrayed artificial humans, not computers, before actually, ahem, seeing the world as it turned out.
It's sort of a social power revolt against intellectual power (well, some kind of it).
Like a tantrum. People who don't like how it really happened still want their deus ex machina, an obedient slave at that, that can take responsibility at that. Their 50 years long shock has receded and they now think they are about to turn this defeat into victory.
only making it bigger and last longer which will only make it worse when it does actually pop
I think that's deliberate. There are a few companies which will feel very well when the bubble pops, having the actual audience as their main capital, while their capitalization and technologies are secondary. The rest are just blindly led by short-term profits.

CEO = Marketing with a different title. Trust the words out of their mouths the same.

If they intend to pay me the same amount to work slower and think less, that's their choice and I will be happy to help them out pursuing it. ChatGPT, explain to my boss how I'm using AI for everything I work on now.

They think they can hire less SWE because of it. Though from my experience all benefits it gives are neutralized by mistakes or does. I have to pay more attention to what it produces to find bugs (and they are subtle, and even then successfully sneak them).
I also frequently notice that I actually can produce more concise code for my user case.
And it is plagiarizing (Microsoft apparently provides some legal protection against a lawsuit, but I don't know if that is for everyone).
A while ago I found a bit less popular code and it came with library. I didn't like their implementation so I started writing my own and copilot basically was suggesting the code from the library I tried to rewrite.

Well, given git is decentralized and self-hostable.....

My for-hire work has been off GitHub for awhile now. My patience for VS Code is razor thin with the stupid features creeping in.

20 years ago I decided to make websites as a career and I’ve been loving it—up until the people who want to sell me tools I don’t want start convincing my bosses that I’m somehow less if I don’t get on board with the always-guessing error machine.

Use Codium instead of VS Code. VS Code is fauxpen source.
I refuse to use, or touch, C#, as a matter of principle at this point.

Microsoft mouthpiece parrots Microsoft talking point. News at eight.

I can already tell the guy is a huge fan of cheeto prez.

I see Microsoft don't need developers and those who work there are morons. That's how I read what Github CEO said.

Embrace? With so many devs constantly being laid off, how about NO?

what a piece of shit. par for the course for a ceo though.

Curious when the last time business insider quoted a labor leader without a CEO or capitalist shill quoted in the same article. A US private equity group Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) acquired a majority share in the parent corp in 2020. They're also selling ads for development in the west bank under yad2 https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/germany-media-giant-axel-springer-advertises-israels-illegal-settlements-in-the-west-bank-through-its-classified-ads-website-yad2-incl-co-comment/

I still remember when some people said that Microsoft buying GitHub wouldn't be a problem in the future.

Time to self host this bitch!

Selfhost what? Git? Git is version control software that you can use entirely locally. The only reason Github/Gitlab/etc exists is because people wanted a central repo to work from.
- I don't think this is true. People didn't want to host their own. It's a pretty big task that takes time and attention away from other activities. Especially if you want your repo to face the public. Just keeping it secure can be a part-time job.
  Perhaps it is becoming more feasible these days.
- Just in case if you're on drugs, https://forgejo.org/
- …..what?

Gargle my balls or get out.

A few years ago, there was potential for dirty looks coming your way if you suggested that you may be using AI for generating code. Soon, it’s going to be frowned upon to boast that you don’t use AI tools (because you’re probably wasting time).

Git out.

Booooooooooo

welp I guess time to open a codeberg account

The git site has instructions on how to create your own git server in 30 mins.

It's very easy once you know it's literally just an SSH account.For personal projects or small teams is absolutely fine.

For open source there are lots of GitHub alternatives

Looks like I’ll get out then.

Thanks for showing your true colors, asshole. I guess the git repositories I have to send potential employers to show the projects that I've done in my spare time might have to go self-hosted.

Call it the network effect, or the momentum of becoming a staple in the tech community, or whatever; GitHub is here to stay for a while, and the leaders in charge of it are well aware of this.

GitHub has gained enough attention that it is almost impossible to ignore. Projects on GitHub tend to attract a level of engagement (code contributions, issue reports, and feedback) that other code forges do not enjoy.

One unfortunate consequence of this, which I have experienced recently, is when recruiters ask for links to my past work or open-source contributions but refuse to accept links to relevant repositories on GitLab. The number of companies where this occurred was significant enough for me to set up mirror repositories on GitHub.

Another frustrating but silly consequence was when I was questioned during one of the interviews why my activity graph on GitHub was empty: I had simply not enabled it.

The problem is the inter-connection to see everything a single person does and their stats. There should be the possibility for a new (decentralized) system in which you can authenticate all your known repositories, no matter whether they're on GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, self-hosted Gitea or something entirely different. And there you could have links to all your activity and a graph without being bound to any single service.
- That may be a good idea. However, people have had around 25 years of familiarity with all things centralised on the internet and the conveniences associated with it. If anything, we are doubling down on the centralised nature of the internet.
  It will take a great amount of time and effort to build a equivalently convenient decentralised alternatives, and to overcome the inertia to migrate to it.
  The latter I believe is only possible when something enormously drastic happens. We had a good number of drastic events happen in the last decade (Twitter poisoning, Meta privacy breaches, Reddit shenanigans), but none enough to convince people to move to alternatives.
  Another possibility is for regulations and/or governments to support the alternatives, but that may have unintended side effects of its own.

just saying codeberg and forgejo is right there and doesn't have ai rubbish.

Replace the CEOs with AI. Hell, replace all executive positions with AI. Think of the savings!

They literally don't do anything other than have meetings and injest executive level reports.
CEOs are unironically the prime candidates for replacing employees with AI, from a direct cost to employ the employee perspective.
I don't give LLM AIs much credit, but they are more intelligent than the average CEO.
Also, LLM AIs, when well-manicured... are generally better at corpospeak and not having massive ego trips than most CEOs.
Probably less likely to intentionally commit crimes as well.

Essentially... Leave now, or contribute to training your replacement.

Not using github anyway

CEOs, dude. Some things never change.

Considering AI is just glorified autocomplete, this announcement is hardly a surprise.

Remember when Microsoft first bought it and not long after they decided that all code in the free repositories was fair game for autocomplete suggestions in Microsoft programs?

This is just the next logical step.

The next, next logical step will be stealing publicly accessible code from other repositories "by accident" if everyone leaves.

I remember when the barrier to entry as a software developer was the cost of tools like compilers. You had to rely on your school or employer to provide them. Most often, people pirated them. With current AI, pirating is not an option.

In the US, everyone is much more prosperous than they were 50 years ago. They don't blink about paying $50/month for a personal phone plan. They pay for multiple streaming plans. They have money coming out their ears. So paying $20-100/month might not discourage a lot of would-be vibe coders. But I don't think this is the case as much in other parts of the world.

Like it or not, agents are shaping up to be important tools. In a world with free IDEs, free forges, free compilers, etc. , the playing field is about to become less level. It's a bit of a momentum check.

Everyone is much more prosperous now than 50 years ago?
- In the US? Yes. Absolutely.

No u lol

is there any script or tool out there that helps automate the mirroring of GH repos to Codeberg (or another forge)? I have 150+ repos, most are archived or outdated, but if I'm migrating I'd like to do with everything.

update:

Codeberg limits the number of repositories per user to 100 by default. If you have more than 100 repositories to migrate, you'll need to request a higher quota following their instructions.

bummer; I might need to host forgejo

https://www.rahuljuliato.com/posts/github_to_codeberg has some instructions on how to do a bulk migration using LionyxML's script. https://codeberg.org/LionyxML/migrate-github-to-codeberg
Honestly,I just picked the 10 most used ones, mirrored them for a while, and called it a day. I believe there is processes out there but you may run into Github API restrictions if you do it all at the same time (and/or without a specific token).

So glad I'm a giant fuck up and went to school for coding but never did anything with it, at least I don't have to deal with finding a new job now because fuck all this AI shit.

If your job involves any analysis, you're next. Once they work out the remaining robotic kinks, labor intensive jobs are cooked. You will not escape.
- Oh I'm quite aware of that I just bought some time, my other hobbies being music, video art and graphics design all of which AI has already taken a giant shit all over.

Why do all these idiots behave as if they knew where the future is?

If it's about all the achievements they've read about and seen in games like Civilization, real-life doesn't quite look like that. Though in some sense these games, though good, have kinda simplified and made degenerate the understanding of the progress by many people. Similarly to what Soviet school program did, but in a more persuasive and pleasant way.

There's no tech tree. There's been plenty of attempts at any breakthrough before it actually happened. Suppose this "AI" is to some real future AGI what Leonardo's machines were to Wright brothers' machines, even in that case there's no hurry to embrace it.

If he thinks he's looking at a 90% achieved tech tree point with powerful perks, then his profession should probably be that of a janitor. Same day schedule, same places to mop up, you know.

I don't think he's wrong in some regards, but only in the 'AI looks somewhat promising in our future'. He didn't need to be condescending about it.

So many people completely miss the mark when it comes to AI and coding. It's great for code reviews on code you wrote yourself, and it can be handy when you're developing code for a domain you don't have much experience in.

What it is not good for is writing code on its own. Not if you want your code to be efficient, or performant, work correctly, or even compile.

You missed 'secure' out of that list. Vibe coding is tantamount to communism, the way that everyone who uses it ends up publicly owned.

So, I use Github to host some very simple projects, such as my world map running with Leaflet.

Is there another place that would let me easily and freely do this?

Codeberg apparently
- Cheers, I'll check it out.
gitlab
- Thanks, I'll give that a look!
Same, i need to find a new place as I use it as basically a free HTML blog and tracker for my table top games.

OK, cya.

Ah yes, the noble Caveman Coder, hunched over their keyboard like it’s a slab of stone, grunting at a missing semicolon for the past three hours. Meanwhile, the AI user already built the same app, deployed it, A/B tested it, and had time for a coffee break and existential crisis. But no worries, Caveman insists “real coders solve things manually” as they slowly reinvent the wheel...... square-shaped, of course. Fire bad. IDE scary. AI tool? “Witchcraft! Burn the witch 🧹

I've tried Copilot for a while and played around with Cursor for a bit. I was better and faster without Copilot due to sometimes not paying enough attention of the lines it would generate. This would cause subtle bugs that took a long time to debug. Cursor just produced unmaintainable code-bases that I had no knowledge of, and to make major changes, would be faster for me to just rewrite it from scratch. The act of typing gives me time to think more about what I'm doing or am going to do, while Copilot generations are distracting and break my thought processes. I work best with good LSP tooling and sometimes AI chatbots (mostly just for customized example snippets for libraries or frameworks I'm unfamiliar with; though that has its own problems because the LLMs knowledge is out of date a lot) that don't directly modify my code.
And the vibe coder is also blissfully unaware of all the zero days he/she has also deployed along with his prompted autocomplete output of a program.
Great work! Very efficient!
I'm totally sure said program doesn't also needlessly pull in a gigantic mess of additional libraries, just to use one or two functions from it, I'm sure this is a very compute and memory efficient program.
And I am totally sure this will all work great and be easily reconfigured to keep up with any changing requirements, because we all know software devs always get very concrete, stable, and well defined requirements to work with.

Wait so you guys choose to sit and code something for a month instead of for a day? I don't have that kinda time and I need to make money fast. What took me a month now takes me a day. AI has reduced my workload by 90%

Fuck manual typing and muscle memory and hundreds of hours infront of a screen. Only 0.43% of the population can write code. I am safe. I will never lose the ability and my services will always be needed.

At the rate that ppl are now developing programs you WILL be left in the dark ages typing everything manually. I have a wife to please and adventures that await.

Only 0.43% of the population can write code.
Which doesn't include you.
I will never lose the ability and my services will always be needed.
You are a highly, highly specialized, but also simultaneously low skilled worker who can only work with a very specific set of services, which are all paygated by vendors, who will immediately jack the fuck up out of their pricing as soon as they are able.
You are delusional.
Even in some hyper dystopia where all coding is outsourced to an AI, all you are is a prompt generator.
Do you think an AI that can write inefficient code... cannot write prompts?
You are a loon.
Learn how to code. It's pretty rewarding.