If I'm reading this right, this is (really solid) future planning but won't help with the current outages?
I'd have thought so from the headline + initial content but then they say that the horizontal scale techniques are basically carrying over from the existing architecture (where it seems the problem is?) and this is mostly to help with what they call "vertical scale" (intra-repo scalability). They also admit right after that the most active repos today will receive short bursts of at most dozens of writes.
So this seems like really useful planning for a near future that likely helps prevent more issues but isn't really meant to help current issues. Am I reading this right?
Of course improvements like this are always useful either way. Not dunking here at all.
Since they wouldn't need to actually have the inactive repositories on disk anymore, I reckon it should solve the horizontal scale issue too by reducing the compute/disk capacity that needs to be maintained.
I think perforce might be the better VCS if you intend to have a bunch of autonomous agents attempt to collaborate over one big pile.
Multiple terabytes is no problem out of the box. You get exclusive locking of files. You can easily take partial checkouts of the monolith. Centralization is a feature in this particular context. Git works great if the need for coordination is moderate. If you've got thousands of automated developers with their hands in the cookie jar, exclusive locks start to look really compelling. Perforce sucks with a highly distributed team, but in the case of an AI agent swarm we presumably have the ability to instantly nuke an agent's checkout if needed. I don't have to contact the agent and wait for them to get out of bed.
Agent scale is definitely on the mind around industry, I wonder what github folks would say in response to https://www.anthropic.com/research/redesigning-source-contro.... It's an interesting read to step back and consider source control from first principles and rebalance the tradeoffs for what qualities matter in this new regime.
Sorry, but thousands of pushes per second, per repository?! In what world could that possibly seem like a sound idea?
Sure, it's nice that you can technically handle it, but to me it sounds like at that point something has gone absolutely horribly wrong in the way you set up your agents. Last time I checked, GitHub was intended as a platform to upstream finished work items, not a realtime cross-agent chat channel.
Handling thousands of git pushes per second implies thousands of issues, thousands of PRs, tens of thousands of comments, thousands of Actions runs, and dozens of releases. How's that part of their infra going to scale?
How about introducing rate limits instead, nudging people to not have agents push every individual single-line changes to GH, but instead have them collaborate as a local cluster and only upstreaming PR-sized chunks of finished work?
If you still need thousands of pushes per second you'd be looking at millions of lines of code, and at that point you're looking at an insane monorepo which is growing at a rate of terabytes per day, and which basically instantly becomes unusable due to being impossible to clone or check out.
My understanding is that forks on GitHub share the same storage in the GH backend.
It's not unreasonable to imagine thousands of commits per second to the kernel, especially if you consider that bots might be watching LKML and applying patches to various forks.
> Handling thousands of git pushes per second implies thousands of issues, thousands of PRs, tens of thousands of comments, thousands of Actions runs, and dozens of releases. How's that part of their infra going to scale?
For each issue my agent might raise 5 independent PRs as experiments.
Further, the more changes there are, the more important it is that they don't conflict, which means smaller changes, which means even more changes.
Bots interleaving typos, single line whitespace fixes, single dependency bumps, etc.
> Sorry, but thousands of pushes per second, per repository?! In what world could that possibly seem like a sound idea?
The only conceivable scenario that I can imagine leading to this volume of writes is a push-based GitOps repository for a huge cluster holding a large volume of apps, each one with many services. Each commit in one if these services triggers a commit to the gitops repo to update the reference to the new container image, which in turns triggers a deployment update.
There is no software project on earth that justifies a rate of changes in magnitudes of dozen of commits per second. This is a symptom of a huge problem, not a sign of times. Even in monorepo mania this sort of thing is inconceivable.
But that's also what you get with vibecoding: lots of output from people who do not have a clue about what they are doing.
Define unreliable? Azure has a 99.97% historical uptime, AWS at 99.95%. Azure is #2 in market share, right beyond AWS. Engineer anecdotes about internal strife doesn’t equate to external reliability. I’m sure you can find AWS engineers complaining about AWS, or GCP, or insert company. (Also, Microsoft owns Azure and GitHub, so what did you expect?)
I don't think this is ironic at all. The source control system is decentralized, in the sense that you can checkout a repo and use it as the central source or truth for everything.
For example, you can clone a repo from GitHub into your workstation,and then clone that repo into multiple folders in your workstation where you unleash agents to implement changes. The you pull those changes to your local repo or even directly to GitHub or GitLab or whatever. That's pretty decentralized.
Now, compare this to the god awful mess that was subversion.
Nah, they replaced GitHub with some in-house videcoded stuff a few months ago, and from what I hear from the grapevine it's not going well.
But there's a number of other big private repos with a high rate of merge on GitHub, and indeed it's currently a bit painful, e.g. the subroutine that check whether a PR can be merged tend to take ages. So my read is that they want to better support these big customers out of concern that they might leave too.
I'd have thought so from the headline + initial content but then they say that the horizontal scale techniques are basically carrying over from the existing architecture (where it seems the problem is?) and this is mostly to help with what they call "vertical scale" (intra-repo scalability). They also admit right after that the most active repos today will receive short bursts of at most dozens of writes.
So this seems like really useful planning for a near future that likely helps prevent more issues but isn't really meant to help current issues. Am I reading this right?
Of course improvements like this are always useful either way. Not dunking here at all.
https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale
Multiple terabytes is no problem out of the box. You get exclusive locking of files. You can easily take partial checkouts of the monolith. Centralization is a feature in this particular context. Git works great if the need for coordination is moderate. If you've got thousands of automated developers with their hands in the cookie jar, exclusive locks start to look really compelling. Perforce sucks with a highly distributed team, but in the case of an AI agent swarm we presumably have the ability to instantly nuke an agent's checkout if needed. I don't have to contact the agent and wait for them to get out of bed.
There're really security issues, and a black box creates black boxes.
Hope it helps improve reliability, it was getting hard to defend GitHub with all the recent outages.
Sure, it's nice that you can technically handle it, but to me it sounds like at that point something has gone absolutely horribly wrong in the way you set up your agents. Last time I checked, GitHub was intended as a platform to upstream finished work items, not a realtime cross-agent chat channel.
Handling thousands of git pushes per second implies thousands of issues, thousands of PRs, tens of thousands of comments, thousands of Actions runs, and dozens of releases. How's that part of their infra going to scale?
How about introducing rate limits instead, nudging people to not have agents push every individual single-line changes to GH, but instead have them collaborate as a local cluster and only upstreaming PR-sized chunks of finished work?
If you still need thousands of pushes per second you'd be looking at millions of lines of code, and at that point you're looking at an insane monorepo which is growing at a rate of terabytes per day, and which basically instantly becomes unusable due to being impossible to clone or check out.
It's not unreasonable to imagine thousands of commits per second to the kernel, especially if you consider that bots might be watching LKML and applying patches to various forks.
> Handling thousands of git pushes per second implies thousands of issues, thousands of PRs, tens of thousands of comments, thousands of Actions runs, and dozens of releases. How's that part of their infra going to scale?
For each issue my agent might raise 5 independent PRs as experiments.
Further, the more changes there are, the more important it is that they don't conflict, which means smaller changes, which means even more changes.
Bots interleaving typos, single line whitespace fixes, single dependency bumps, etc.
The only conceivable scenario that I can imagine leading to this volume of writes is a push-based GitOps repository for a huge cluster holding a large volume of apps, each one with many services. Each commit in one if these services triggers a commit to the gitops repo to update the reference to the new container image, which in turns triggers a deployment update.
There is no software project on earth that justifies a rate of changes in magnitudes of dozen of commits per second. This is a symptom of a huge problem, not a sign of times. Even in monorepo mania this sort of thing is inconceivable.
But that's also what you get with vibecoding: lots of output from people who do not have a clue about what they are doing.
I'm starting to think AI isn't a productivity machine, but rather a machine for hypnotising people into the false belief of productivity.
Edit: https://assets.theregister.com/2026/04/04/azure_talent_exodu... The blog post that story is based on was also on HN.
Edit2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 (1297 points)
For example, you can clone a repo from GitHub into your workstation,and then clone that repo into multiple folders in your workstation where you unleash agents to implement changes. The you pull those changes to your local repo or even directly to GitHub or GitLab or whatever. That's pretty decentralized.
Now, compare this to the god awful mess that was subversion.
Or alternatively someone is doing something very silly.
But there's a number of other big private repos with a high rate of merge on GitHub, and indeed it's currently a bit painful, e.g. the subroutine that check whether a PR can be merged tend to take ages. So my read is that they want to better support these big customers out of concern that they might leave too.