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Transcript: Github flip flops

Anything
University (Grade 16)
English

Transcript: Github flip flops

You guys just see what I did there? See that move? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some of you would call that a 180. I would actually call that impersonating GitHub and their recent changes about GitHub actions. If you haven't been on Twitter or Hacker News, you may not have seen that GitHub made a big change to their GitHub actions. And of course, this led to an absolute like pandemonium. People freaking out, sending all caps tweets. It was a blood bath in those streets. And so, of course, what did GitHub do? They rolled it back.
Now, now before I just start yapping and just give my very emotional appeal to everything that has happened, which by the way, there may be a small crash out by the end of this... Uh, before I do that, you should probably understand what's happening. So, a couple days ago, we were hit with the following title: "Today, we're announcing updates to our pricing and product models for GitHub actions." We got ourselves a pricing change. And typically what a pricing change—at least what I'm familiar with—is that, well, it's time to pay more money. But this one was a bit more complex because first GitHub talks about how there's going to be a price reduction of 40%, and you're like, oh okay, you're making things cheaper. All right. Hey, confusing but okay. This is not norm, this is not industry standard. But then the coup de grâce landed: "We are introducing a 0.22 cent per minute action cloud platform charge for all action workflows across GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners."
Yes, the big glorious change landing was that some people will save some money. Some people attempting to do a little self-hosting themselves, they might start getting charged. Now, I think it's pretty clear from the outside. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to understand what happened here. Charging for self-hosted is just going to never play well in Peoria. It's going to 100% of the time backfire on you. And I have no idea how whoever was in charge of this... How you didn't go, "Oh, yeah, this is a horrible idea." I don't need the community's feedback on this one to know that this is a bad idea.
Anywho, they went through with it. Of course, this led to very many tweets such as this one: "Almost nobody will be impacted by this, and the money is basically nothing." Cool. So, why are you setting your brand perception on fire to do it? I think even better, Mitchell—again, Mitchell is just every time he says something on Twitter, it's worth listening to. It's obvious why this guy has been so successful. He's very good at explaining how everybody feels in a few sentences. I think in a moment when GitHub's reputation amongst developers is at an all-time low, making the policy change to charge for self-hosted runners in any scenario instead of making other technical changes to make GitHub runners more attractive will go down as a very bad move. And he is absolutely correct.
So if you're not familiar with some of the GitHub runner situation, this old script was just all over the place. Jason. And in fact, this script was so upsetting that Zig, the programming language, left GitHub altogether due to the amount of bugs that are surrounding this one little script, which, by the way, if you're not familiar, this literally just pegs CPU until amount of seconds goes by. And there's a nefarious bug that was fixed like two years later that was causing just jobs to run forever. This is a little over four years ago today.
So, get this. This person says, "Hey, we have a bunch of actions that are running. There's 16 individual actions running, which means that even though they're running for 4 to 6 seconds each, we're getting charged 1 minute of running per job. That's 16 minutes every single time we do our actions, even though we have nicely separated them all out." And of course, what is the response from Microsoft? "I really appreciate your detailed feedback. This is really useful for understanding for our planning. Having a runner for each of your jobs is indeed overkill in this scenario." This is just like the most classic Microsoft style of response. The proper response, by the way, is: you know what? GitHub should figure out how to compute CPU time better, and we should not round up all the time. Here's a clear and obvious situation in which we are far exceeding user expectation and charging significantly higher than we need to. We as a company should do better. We should make our platform both technically excellent and precise so our customers do not feel cheated. Yet, that is not the case. That again is not the case.
This reminds me of this article—and I already covered this—which is Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without an online account. Now you may not know this—you may not have heard this—but effectively what happens is that if you made a local account during the out-of-box experience, it could lead to an incomplete setup. So instead of fixing the flow and making, again, their product more technically excellent and great for the customer, what do they do? No, you can't. You should be able to make local accounts this way, you need to go to online accounts. Like, again, it's just no respect for the customer. This is the most classic Microsoft behavior of all time. Anytime there's a problem, hey brother, you're doing it wrong. That's skill issues on your behalf. You need to change your ways and do it the way we want you to do it.
So, of course, over the days of everybody freaking out, the VP—the new VP, by the way, of GitHub—Jared Palmer, which I do want to say for the record, he's an excellent engineer. I have known him personally for quite a few years and honestly I think he could potentially turn this ship around. I have very high hopes for Jared. He says, "Hey, we are actually going to postpone the self-hosted GitHub charge for runners." I'm very, very happy that he's doing this. This is obviously a whole bunch of—let's see, let's call it corporate speech, especially this line right here: "We missed the opportunity to gather feedback from the community ahead of this move." Reality is, you never needed feedback. It's an obvious L. It is a clear and obvious L. You just have to go, "Huh, how do people feel about runners? Oh, they're very upset at how technically like dilapidated they are. Let's fix that first before we do something that will be perceived as adversarial."
Let's first make things excellent so people just want to run their stuff on our platform and then we could be territorial. Maybe it's not adversarial, just territorial. Also, I do want to throw out one other thing. I really have disliked how this conversation has morphed into a couple things, which is that, hey, not only is GitHub doing these pricing changes, but also, "Hey dude, we gave away 11.5 billion minutes, that's $184 million to OSS. We're supporting OSS." I do want to throw this out here. When you make an adversarial price change, but then on the other hand, you say how good everything is and like all the good moves you're doing, it kind of feels like emotional manipulation. Okay. I kind of feel like you're doing some sort of hostage situation with my emotions where you're just like, "Hey, yeah, this was a good—like you see how good we are. I'm going to kick you in the nuts, but I'm going to give you a present at the exact same time." And I want you to say thank you. Maybe I don't want to say thank you.
Again, I think Mitchell Hashimoto—again, amazing, amazing guy—says it really, really true here, which is: the first step to fix GitHub organizationally is to split Copilot and GitHub into separate entities. For those that don't know, if you didn't catch up on any of my many videos about me being frustrated at Microsoft, they have moved GitHub. They no longer have a CEO, but they moved GitHub under the core AI VP. And so, if you look right here, you can see Jared is actually a VP of core AI and a senior VP of GitHub. So, he's really under the AI org of Microsoft. He is not under developer experience or developer tools or developer consideration. It's under Copilot. It's under "I'm going to use your code to make our AI better" organization. Bring in an inspirational CEO from the dev community to lead GitHub. Don't let it report into the nebulous corporate machine. Let the octocat free. And Mitchell is 100% correct here. They just simply need to separate out from AI. Like, yes, AI, fine. You know what? Your AI can learn from GitHub, but you should make GitHub under the developer, or you should be making it excellent.
See, the thing that's been really bothering me about GitHub is for the last like seven years, they haven't made any change to the actual core system. PRs have remained largely unchanged in how you interact for as long as I can remember. My experience on GitHub in 2012 and 2013 is not much different than it is in 2025. Now, I get it. Like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But there are such things as stacked diffs, which is absolutely incredible. It was created in Facebook like 10 years ago. Google's been using them a whole bunch. It's been around for a decade, and GitHub has made no effort into making it happen. In fact, an entire cottage industry started up making stacked diffs on top of GitHub. And I even used it because it was pretty dang awesome.
Also in the last couple years, an entirely new version control that's built on top of GitHub that really takes in this idea of a whole new approach to how commits and stacks and merges and everything should work. And apparently it's significantly easier. I have not—y'know, to be fair, I have not yet used it. I've heard really, really great things. GitHub is making no actual effort towards how do we make better developer interaction as opposed to what, more Copilot?
Now, I know at the end of the day, I might be being a little unfair. Maybe I'm a little negative. Uh, I don't want to be negative because ultimately I do want GitHub to be successful. I host a lot of my code there. I would like better experiences. The thing that just makes me upset is that you've had so many at bats at this point and you've yet to just get a runner on base. Just give us a runner on base. Start focusing on the technical excellence and allow us to have a platform that matches the open source software that's being hosted on it.
I think at this time there has been no greater point for GitHub to actually be in danger. The incumbent could be toppled if a platform became appealing enough for people to jump ship to. Now, I know that's going to be very difficult. Obviously, there's just so much momentum behind GitHub and I totally get why it will continue to win and I just—they have so many more at bats left. Just please start getting runners on bases.
Hey, like the video, make a comment, tell me how you feel. Uh, also thanks for all the subs, dude. You guys are crazy. Genuinely appreciate it. Over a million subs. I cannot believe a channel talking about code and code-related news is out here sitting at a million. You guys are awesome. Thank you very much. The name is The Primogen.
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