The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride:
> [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1]
> [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [2]
> [2025-11-28T09:21:12Z] it’s abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it [3]
On the previous HN article, I recall many a comment talking about how they should change this, leave the politics/negative juju out because it was a bad look for the Zig community.
It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits. I commend them for their actions in doing what's best for the community at the cost of some personal mea culpa edits.
I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting their failures and changing their mind. For some reason I see the opposite: people respecting those who "stick to their guns" or double down when something is clearly wrong. As you say, the context matters and these edits seem to be learning from the feedback rather than saving face since the sentiment stands, just in a less needlessly targeted way.
As I see it, someone who "listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride" would include a note at the end of the post about the edits. Admitting you were wrong requires not erasing the evidence of what you said.
(He did post a kind of vague apology in https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p..., but it's ambiguous enough that anyone who was offended is free to read it as either retracting the offending accusation, or not. This is plausibly the best available alternative for survival in the current social-media landscape, because it's at best useless to apologize to a mob that's performatively offended on behalf of people they don't personally know, and usually counterproductive because it marks you as a vulnerable victim, but the best available alternative might still tend to weaken the kind of integrity we're talking about rather than strengthen it.)
There is utility in indicating how surprised / concerned you are at a certain process or event. We can flatten out all communication and boil everything down to an extremely neutral "up", "down", and "nailed it to exacting precision".
I find the fact that this painting has been hung crooked by 0.00001º: down
I find torture and mass murder: down
Clearly this is a ridiculous state of affairs. There's more gradations available than this.
Possibly coloured by my dutch culture: I think this rewrite is terrible. The original sentence was vastly superior, though I think the first rewrite (newbies to rookies) was an improvement.
The zig team is alarmed, and finds this state of affairs highly noteworthy and would like to communicate this more emotional, gut instincty sense in their words.
There's a reason humans invent colourful language and epithets. They always do, in all languages. Because it's useful!
And this rewrite takes it out. That's not actually a good thing. The fact that evidently the internet is so culturally USA-ised that any slightly colourful language is instantly taken as a personal affront and that in turn completely derails the entire debate into a pointless fight over etiquitte and whether something is 'appropriate' is fucking childish. I wish it wasn't so.
In human communication, the US is somewhat notorious in how flattened its emotional range is of interaction amongst friendly folk. One can bring anthropology into it if one must: Loads of folks from vastly different backgrounds all moving to a vast expanse of land? Given that cultural misunderstanding is extremely likely and the cost of such a misunderstanding is disastrously high, best plaster a massive smile on your face and be as diplomatic as you can be!
Consider as a practical example: Linus Torvalds' many famed communications. "NVidia? Fuck you!" was good. It made clear, in a very, very pithy way, that Linus wasn't just holding a negative opinion about the quality and behaviour of the nvidia gfx driver team at the time, but that this negative opinion was universal across a broad range of concerns and extremely so. It caused a shakeup where one was needed. All in 3 little words.
(Possibly the fact that the internet in general is even more incapable of dealing with colourful language is not necessarily the fault of USification of the internet: The internet is a lot like early US, at least in the sense that the risk of cultural misunderstanding is far higher than in face to face communications on most places on the planet).
Thanks for pointing this out! I looked at the edit history and without looking at the timestamps assumed it was in reverse chronological order. Seeing that I was wrong brought a smile to my face.
I appreciate that Andrew and the other Zig team members are really passionate about their project, their goals, and the ideals behind those goals. I was dismayed by the recent news of outbursts which do a lot to undermine their goals. That they’re listening to feedback and trying to take the high road (despite feeling a lot of frustration with the direction industry is taking) should be commended.
Zig is the language that was intentionally made to fail and error out on windows carriage returns instead of parsing them like every language ever made. They made a version for windows and then made it not work with every windows text editor. Their answer was to 'get better text editors' or 'make a preprocessing program to strip out carriage returns' or 'don't use windows' (they had a windows executable).
This is not a group with community or pragmatism from the start.
I did prefer that honest line about bloated, buggy Javascript framework. Otherwise might as well ask an LLM to spit out a sanitized apology text for your change in provider. Just like ten thousand identical others copied from a playbook. Allow your eyes to comfortably glaze over with zero retention.
Perhaps the final edit should have included the complaint about 'buggy bloated Javascript' as that's a very substantive issue - and now I don't know if they changed that as 'tone' or because they decided that technical criticism wasn't correct, and there are other issues?
Well, no, they still acted based on the original ego/pride, they just changed blogpost to look different.
I mean, reason of "we don't want to be tied with direction MS takes" is good enough, not sure why they felt need to invent reasons and nitpick some near irrelevant things just to excuse their actions
They should know that crap software is rarely intentional as they make it out to be in the initial version of the text, what you get is what they are able to build in the environment they are in (that matters too). Capability and environment.
I think the Reddit mobile website team might be the exception to that. What they make is a particular brand of unusable and from what I remember there is evidence of them talking about how that was intentional.
Kelly’s indignant attitude and commitment to “engineering excellence” suggest a bright future for Zig. It’s good to see the leader of a technical project get angry about mediocrity.
A righteous, passionate anger can be indistinguishable from love. Having and committing to something worth fighting over, however bloody the battles may be, can make a life just a meaningful as one that practices disciplined quiescence, reflection, acceptance, etc. Love is what it is because it must paradoxically accept its opposites; love can be anger, anger can be love. The real mind killer is a pat moralism!
I would contend that anger is the only thing that drives any kind of progress. An abundance of love means accepting, adjusting, and forgiving, which are antithetical to systemic change.
You need that middle-finger-to-everyone, "let me show you how it's really done" energy to build anything meaningful. Pretty much all the great builders I can think of in tech history are/were deeply angry people.
AI witch-hunts are definitely a problem. The only tell you can actually rely on is when the AI says something so incredibly stupid that it not only fails to understand what it is talking about but the very meaning of words themselves.
Eg,metaphors that make no sense or fail to contribute any meaningful insight or extrenely cliched phrases ("it was a dark and stormy night...") used seriously rather than for self-deprecating humor.
My favorite example of an AI tell was a youtube video about serial killers i was listening to for background noise which started one of its sentences with "but what at first seemed to be an innocent night of harmless serial murder quickly turned to something sinister."
This has always been the case in the "corporate/professional" world imo.
It's just much easier now for "laypeople" to also adjust their style to this. My prediction is people will get quickly tired of it (as evidenced by your comment)
Whatever the wording, what they are writing truly shows on Github. There are many things wrong with its code display ... All of which used to work fine or were not added in this buggy state in the first place.
Code folding is buggy. Have some functions that have inner functions or other foldable stuff like classes with methods and inside the method maybe some inner function? It will only show folding buttons sporadically, seemingly without pattern.
Also standard text editing stuff like "double click and drag" no longer properly works without issues/has weird effects and behavior. The inspection of identifiers interferes with being able to properly select text.
The issue search is stupid too, often doesn't find the things one searches for.
You must be logged in to search properly too.
Most of the functionality is tied to running that JavaScript.
In short, it shows typical signs of a platform that is more and more JavaScriptianized with bloated frameworks making things work half-assed and not properly tested for sane standard behavior.
But there is more. Their silly AI bots closing issues. "State bot". "Dependabot". All trash or half thought out annoying (mis-)features. Then recently I read here on HN, that apparently a project maintainer can edit another person's post! This reeks of typical Microsoft issues with permissions to do things and not properly thinking such a thing through. Someone internally must be pushing for all this crap.
Do people actually use GitHub to inspect code? I figure for anything that's not a 1-second lookup, I might as well just do at least a shallow clone of the repo, and look through it with my own personally-tailored editor instead.
Not to say their implementation doesn't suck. I just wouldn't know because even a non-buggy one would probably still be a subpar experience.
At least he edited it to something more palatable. I vastly prefer someone who can admit to making a mistake and amending what they said to someone who doubles down. The latter attitude has become far too normalised in the last few years.
Honestly, why do so many people, especially in the western hemisphere, act so shocked when somebody speaks their mind openly?
To me this kind of communication says it comes from a real person who has real experiences, not the marketing department, and is understandably angry at the people who make his life worse. And it's natural to insult those people. Insults are a signal, not noise. They signal something is wrong and people should pay attention to it.
I hear criticisms about being unprofessional and the like. So what? I don't wanna live in a world where everything everyone says is supposed to be filtered to match some arbitrary restrictions made up be people who more often than not can't do the work themselves.
Almost all of the actually competent people I personally know speak like this.
They can't stand those dragging us down through incompetence. They get angry when something that should work doesn't. They are driven by quality and will not be silent when it's lacking. If somebody fucked up, they will tell them they fucked up and have to fix it.
I say this as someone who has been cautioning about Microsoft's ownership of GitHub for years now... but the Zig community has been high drama lately. I thought the Rust community had done themselves a disservice with their high tolerance of drama, but lately Zig seems to me to be more drama than even Rust.
I was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I could tell, seems like a possibly immature teenager. But to have a whole community gang up on you with pitch forks because they have a suspicion you might use AI... that was gross to watch.
I was already turned off by the constant Zig spam approach to marketing. But now that we're getting pitchfork mobs and ranty anti-AI diatribes it just seems like a community sustaining itself on negative energy. I think they can possibly still turn it around but it might involve cleaning house or instituting better rules for contributors.
What makes you say that? Couldn’t it be an immature adult?
> because they have a suspicion you might use AI
Was that the reason? From what I remember (which could definitely be incomplete information) the complaint was that they were clearly using AI while claiming no AI had been used, stole code from another project while claiming it was their own, refused to add credit when a PR for that was made, tried to claim a namespace on open-vsx…
At a certain point, that starts to look outright malicious. It’s one thing to not know “the rules” but be willing to fix your mistakes when they are pointed out. It’s an entirely different thing to lie, obfuscate, and double down on bad attitude.
> I was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I could tell, seems like a possibly immature teenager. But to have a whole community gang up on you with pitch forks because they have a suspicion you might use AI... that was gross to watch.
Your assumption is woefully incorrect. People were annoyed, when the explicit and repeated lie that the AI generated site he released which was mostly written by AI, was claimed to be AI free. But annoyed isn't why he was met with the condemnation he received.
In addition to the repeated lies, there's the long history of this account of typosquatting various groups, many, many crypto projects, the number of cursor/getcursor accounts, the license violation and copying code without credit from an existing community group (with a reputation for expending a lot of effort, just to help other zig users), the abusive and personal attack editing the PR asking, for nothing but crediting the source of the code he tried to steal. All the while asking for donations for the work he copied from others.
All of that punctuated by the the fact he seems to have plans to typo squat Zig users given he controls the `zigglang` account on github. None of this can reasonable be considered just a simple mistake on a bad day. This is premeditated malicious behavior from someone looking to leach off the work of other people.
People are mad because the guy is a selfish asshole, who has a clear history of coping from others, being directly abusive, and demonstrated intent to attempt to impersonate the core ziglang team/org... not because he dared to use AI.
I do think that it was weird to focus on the AI aspect so much. AI is going to pollute everything going forward whether you like it or not. And honestly who cares, either it is a good ressource for learning or it’s not. You have to decide that for yourself and not based on whether AI helped writing it.
However I think some of the critique was because he stole the code for the interactive editor and claimed he made it himself, which of course you shouldn’t do.
You're assuming they are a teenager but you don't know. They used code without attribution and when asked to do so, they edited the comment and mocked the requestor. And you're calling the zig community the bully? They lied about not using AI. This kind of dishonesty does not need to be tolerated.
Disservice? Rust is taking over the world while they still have nothing to show basically (Servo, the project Rust was created for, is behind ladybird of all things). Every clueless developer and their dog thinks Rust is like super safe and great, with very little empirical evidence still after 19 years of the language's existence.
Zig people want Zig to "win". They are appearing on Hacker News almost every day now, and for that purpose this kind of things matters more than the language's merits themselves. I believe the language has a good share of merits though, far more than Rust, but it's too early and not battle tested to get so much attention.
This, I was shocked when I read the first version. I get it if you’re an influencer, but as a programming language people need to expect you can manage your emotions and be objective
that's a long time between edits. as a single contributor to my own posts, i usually achieve a like iteration within minutes. did they have to have a board meeting in between the changes? lovely conservative process. "rookies", love it
Nice that they cleaned it up, but Andrew has a pattern of coming across across as even less mentally stable than the Notepad++ dev, which isn't a good look for a BDFL. For example, he randomly broke down in tears during a presentation not long ago.
this Corporate Americanism is of only positivity and fake smiles is exactly how we end up with enshittified products, because no one is ever called out for it. If the feedback is too soft, it just gets swept under the rug.
No, the edits are better. The original message made unwarranted assumptions, and used intentionally inaccurate language. That's objectively bad communication.
It's not a binary choice between insults (escalates conflict, destabilizes rational decision making) vs hiding your opinions. That's what the word tact is for. It's simply, quite literally, a skill issue if someone can't find a middle ground between those two failure modes.
The fact that three revisions were needed to tone down inflammatory language could raise questions about impulse control in leadership decisions (regularly prioritizing ideological positions over pragmatic stability). This is notable given that Zig has been in development since 2015 and remains at version 0.15.1 as of August 2025.
IMHO, the main advantage of github is that it is an ecosystem. This is a well-thought-out Swiss knife: a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system, convenient issues, as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners. In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser. You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly. Having a sponsorship system is also great, you don't have to search for external donation platforms and post weird links in your profile/repository.
All in one, that's why developers like it so much. The obsession with AI makes me nervous, but the advantages still outweigh, as for me, the average developer. For now.
I don't agree with this at all. I think the reason Github is so prominent is the social network aspects it has built around Git, which created strong network effects that most developers are unwilling to part with. Maintainers don't want to loose their stars and the users don't want to loose the collective "audit" by the github users.
Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality, and like it or not are now part of modern software engineering. Developers are more likely to use a repo that has more stars than its alternatives.
I know that the code should speak for itself and one should audit their dependencies and not depend on Github stars, but in practice this is not what happens, we rely on the community.
These are the only reasons I use GitHub. The familiarity to students and non-developers is also a plus.
I have no idea what the parent comment is talking about a "well-formed CI system." GitHub Actions is easily the worst CI tool I've ever used. There are no core features of GitHub that haven't been replicated by GitLab at this point, and in my estimation GitLab did all of it better. But, if I put something on GitLab, nobody sees it.
Github became successful long before those 'social media features' were added, simply because it provided free hosting for open source projects (and free hosting services were still a rare thing back in the noughties).
The previous popular free code hoster was Sourceforge, which eventually entered its what's now called "enshittifcation phase". Github was simply in the right place at the right time to replace Sourceforge and the rest is history.
> Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality, and like it or not are now part of modern software engineering.
I hate that this is perceived as generally true. Stars can be farmed and gamed; and the value of a star does not decay over time. Issues can be automatically closed, or answered with a non-response and closed. Numbers of followers is a networking/platform thing (flag your significance by following people with significant follower numbers).
> Developers are more likely to use a repo that has more stars than its alternatives.
If anything, star numbers reflect first mover advantage rather than code quality. People choosing which one of a number of competing packages to use in their product should consider a lot more than just the star number. Sadly, time pressures on decision makers (and their assumptions) means that detailed consideration rarely happens and star count remains the major factor in choosing whether to include a repo in a project.
> Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality
They're NOT! Lots of trashy AI projects have +50k stars.
> Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality
having used gerrit 10 years ago there's nothing about github's PRs that I like more, today.
> code navigation simply in a web browser
this is nice indeed, true.
> You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly.
if only. GHA are a hot mess because somehow we've landed in a local minimum of pretend-YAML-but-actually-shell-js-jinja-python and they have a smaller or bigger outage every other week, for years now.
> why developers like it so much
most everything else is much worse in at least one area and the most important thing it's what everyone uses. no one got fired for using github.
The main thing I like about Github's PRs is that it's a system I'm already familiar with and have a login/account for. It's tedious going to contribute to a project to find I have to sign up for and learn another system.
I've used Gerrit years ago, so wasn't totally unfamiliar, but it was still awkward to use when Go were using it for PRs. Notably that project ended up giving up on it because of the friction for users - and they were probably one of the most likely cases to stick to their guns and use something unusual.
> having used gerrit 10 years ago there's nothing about github's PRs that I like more, today.
I love patch stack review systems. I understand why they're not more popular, they can be a bit harder to understand and more work to craft, but it's just a wonderful experience once you get them. Making my reviews work in phabricator made my patchsets in general so much better, and making my patchsets better have improved my communication skills.
I used gerrit a bit at work but any time I want to contribute to OSS project requiring to use it I just send a message with bugfix patch applied and leave, it's so much extra effort for drive by contributions that I don't care.
It's fine for code review in a team, not really good in GH-like "a user found a bug, fixed it, and want to send it" contribution scheme
Maybe I have low standards given I've never touched what gitlab or CircleCi have to offer, but compared to my past experiences with Buildbot, Jenkins and Travis, it's miles ahead of these in my opinion.
Am I missing a truly better alternative or CI systems simply are all kind of a pita?
The big issue with Github is that they never denied feeding ai with private repositories. (Gitlab for example did that when asked). This fact alone makes many users bitter, even for organizations not using private repos per se.
>a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners.
It feels to me like people have become way too reliant on this (in particular, forcing things into CI that could easily be done locally) and too trusting of those runners (ISTR some reports of malware).
>In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser.
I've always found their navigation quite clunky and glitchy.
Underrated feature is the code search. Everyone starts out thinking they’ll just slap elastic search or similar in front of the code but it’s more nuanced than that. GitHub built a bespoke code search engine and published a detailed blog post about it afterwards.
> In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser.
IMHO the vanilla Github UI sucks for code browsing since it's incredibly slow, and the search is also useless (the integrated web-vscode works much better - e.g. press '.' inside a Github project).
> as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners
The only good thing about the Github CI system are the free runners (including free Mac runners), for everything else it's objectively worse than the alternatives (like Gitlab CI).
Well, I guess. It's not a surprise LinkedIn and GitHub are owned by the same entity. Both are degrading down to the same Zuckernet-style engagement hacking, and pseudo-resume self-boosting portfolio-ware. If the value of open source has become "it gets me hired", then ... fine. But that's not why many of us do free software development.
GitHub's evolution as a good open source hosting platform stalled many years ago. Its advantages are its social network effects, not as technical infrastructure.
But from a technology and UX POV it's got growing issues because of this emphasis, and that's why the Zig people have moved, from what I can see.
I moved my projects (https://codeberg.org/timbran/) recently and have been so far impressed enough. Beyond ideological alignment (free software, distaste for Microsoft, want to get my stuff off US infrastructure [elbows up], etc.) the two chief advantages are that I could create my own "organization" without shelling over cash, and run my own actions with my own machines.
And since moving I haven't noticed any drop in engagement or new people noticing the project since moving. GitHub "stars" are a shite way of measuring project success.
Forgejo that's behind Codeberg is similar enough to GitHub that most people will barely notice anyways.
I'm personally not a fan of the code review tools in any of them (GitLab, Foregejo, or GitHub) because they don't support proper tracking of review commits like e.g. Gerritt does but oh well. At least Foregejo / Codeberg are open to community contribution.
> In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser
How do you define "code navigation"? It might've got a bit easier with automatic highlighting of selected symbols, but in return source code viewer got way too laggy and, for a couple of years now, it has this weird bug with misplaced cursors if code is scrolled horizontally. I actually find myself using the "raw" button more and more often, or cloning repo even for some quick ad-hoc lookups.
Edit: not to mention the blame view that actively fights with browser's built in search functionality.
Having used Forgejo with AGit now, IMO the PR experience on GitHub is not great when trying to contribute to a new project. It's just unnecessarily convoluted.
They have zero fees for individuals too which is amazing. Thanks to it I gained my first sponsor when one of my projects was posted here. Made me wish sponsorships could pay the bills.
I don't get what people are complaining about. I haven't run into these AI issues except for Copilot appearing AS AN OPTION in views. Otherwise it seems to be working the same has it always
Would you say Github has any significant advantages over Gitlab in this regard? I always found them to be on par, with incremental advantages on either side.
Additional note on Codeberg, which I think is great as a project, but I got curious on what infrastructure they are running on and how reliable this would be for larger corporate repos.
[...] Although aged, the performance (and even energy efficiency) is often not much worse than with new hardware that we could afford. In the interest of saving embodied carbon emissions from hardware manufacturing, we believe that used hardware is the more sustainable path.
[...] We are investigating how broken Apple laptops could be repurposed into CI runners. After all, automated CI usage doesn't depend on the same factors that human beings depend on when using a computer (functioning screen, speakers, keyboard, battery, etc.). If you own a broken M1/M2 device or know someone who does, and believe that it is not worth a conventional repair, we would be happy to receive your hardware donation and give it a try!
[...] While it usually holds up nicely, we see sudden drop in performance every few days. It can usually be "fixed" with a simple restart of Forgejo to clear the backlog of queries.
Gives both early-Google as well as hackerspace vibes, which can or can not be a good thing.
Their reliability is not great unfortunately. Currently their 24h uptime is 89% for the main site. They are partially degraded right now.
The 14 day uptime is 98% but I think that’s actually because some of their auxiliary systems have great uptime, the main site is never that great it seems.
To be fair, Codeberg isn’t for corporate repos, it’s for FLOSS projects. Take a look at their Terms of Use. They don’t aim to be a commercial provider, rather the opposite.
oh wow I had a larger cluster than that since I was 20 more than half a decade ago, considering that the costs appear to be so low maybe I should also pop out few free services since at the moment I pay $600+ just on power costs alone for idle hardware on my personal cluster. If anyone has any ideas feel free to email me at: news.ycombinator.com.reassure132@passmail.net
There have been complaints about it on Reddit as well. I registered an account recently and to me the annoying thing is the constant "making sure you are not a bot" check. For now I see no reason to migrate, but I do admit Forgejo looks very interesting to self-host.
3. They have a UI, but anyone can also build one and the ecosystem is shared
I've been considering Gerrit for git-codereview, and tangled will be interesting when private data / repos are a thing. Not trying to have multiple git hosts while I wait
I moved (from selfhost gitlab) to forgejo recently, and for my needs it's a lot better, with a lot less hassle. It also seems a lot more performant (again probably because I don't need a lot of the advanced features of gitlab).
Crazy. Who would have an incentive to spend resources on DDoS'ing Codeberg? The only party I can think of would be Github. I know that the normalization of ruthlessness and winner-takes-all mentality made crime mandatory for large parts of the economy, but still cannot wrap my mind around it.
Part of the problem is that Codeberg/Gitea's API endpoints are well documented and there are bots that scrape for gitea instances. Its similar to running SSH on port 22 or hosting popular PHP forums software, there are always automated attacks by different entities simply because they recognize the API.
GitHub uptime isn't perfect either. You will notice these outages from time to time if your employer is using it for more than just "store some git repos", e.g. using GHA for builds and deploys, packages etc.
Because they are Codeberg I'm betting they have a philosophical aversion to using a cloud based ddos protection service like Cloudflare. Sadly the problem is that noone has come up with any other type of solution that actually works.
Let me be blunt: this looks like a tantrum. Bugs exist, and they're sometimes fixed more slowly than we'd like, but given the size of the GitHub ecosystem this is probably just one of many outstanding bugs. Blaming AI is baseless - not that it couldn't be true, but the conclusion seems to be drawn from a single issue.
What does this mean for the Zig project? I haven't heard of Codeberg, they may be great, but for a popular open-source project I'd expect a proper discussion before deciding to move or weighing the pros and cons of different hosting options. From what I'm hearing, Zig is technically excellent but seems to lack level‑headed, mature leadership. That's not unique: many open‑source projects started by brilliant engineers struggle as they grow and need a new leadership structure. That transition can be painful and could even harm adoption.
> Bugs exist, and they're sometimes fixed more slowly than we'd like
Then I think the larger point I'd make is that it's impossible to get anyone to care. We've let tech giants like MS become so large they can essentially just ignore problems with their service, and as a customer, it does not matter that you are paying for it, or how much you pay, you're essentially nothing to MS. You pay not only in the direct cost of the product, but in the indirect costs of any problem with the product will hit you; e.g., here, with VMs just spinning due to really basic bugs. But you're right, nobody ever got fired for using Github.
The big "pro" of moving to a smaller platform to me, I hope, is that they're at least incentivized to help you succeed.
One reason I think most CI scripts should just be — as much as possible — scripts, in the literal sense, is that not only promotes running them locally, it also promotes moving to other CI platforms.
> Bugs exist, and they're sometimes fixed more slowly than we'd like, but given the size of the GitHub ecosystem this is probably just one of many outstanding bugs.
Sorry to be blunt, but you've said nothing of substance. To address the actual criticism you need to explain why these specific "inexcusable bugs" they cite are excusable from your perspective. Otherwise if the whole website doesn't function for months your statement "bugs exist, fixed slower than we'd like" would also apply and be just as meaningless
LLMs are useful, but AI is itself a marketing term that has begun to lose its luster. It’s rapidly becoming an annoying or trendy label, not a cutting edge one.
I guarantee that in ~24 months, most AI features will still remain in some form or another on most apps, but the marketing language of AI-first will have evaporated entirely.
> AI is itself a marketing term that has begun to lose its luster. It’s rapidly becoming an annoying or trendy label, not a cutting edge one.
Where have you been the last 15 years? However, I agree with your prediction. Coke making AI advertisements may have had cache a couple years ago, but now would be a doofus move.
Have you watched broadcast TV lately? Every single advert is AI generated. Pay attention and you’ll see the telltale signs: stitched together 3 second clips with continuity problems, every showdown from a fixed set of compositions, etc. it’s just less noticeable to the average viewer than that coke ad.
I don’t remember AI being used as a widespread marketing term until 2-3 years ago. Before that it was just more of a vague tech thing you’d sometimes see, but now every single app seems to have reframed their business to be about AI agents.
Their most most recent update replaces all this with a list of recently updated PRs and issues. I've been learning on it heavily since it came out. One of the few recent changes that really feels like a clear improvement.
Haven't used the dashboard in years. What's on it now might be more useful. The homepage for me should be set to Notifications.
At any rate, the feed is still available and you can reach it via browser autocomplete. I open GitHub by typing "not" in my URL bar and landing on the notifications page.
One thing that's really nice about codeberg is how fast the pages load. Browsing GitHub often feels very sluggish. Obviously there's a difference in scale there, but I hope codeberg can keep being fast.
$ time curl -L 'https://codeberg.org/'
real 0m3.063s
user 0m0.060s
sys 0m0.044s
$ time curl -L 'https://github.com/'
real 0m1.357s
user 0m0.077s
sys 0m0.096s
That depends on location and GitHub pages generally take a while to execute all the javascript for a usable page even after the html is fetched while pages on Codeberg require much less javascript to be usable and are quite usable even without javascript.
Here are my results for what it's worth
$ time curl -o /dev/null -s -L 'https://codeberg.org'
real 0m0.907s
user 0m0.027s
sys 0m0.009s
$ time curl -o /dev/null -s -L 'https://github.com/'
real 0m0.514s
user 0m0.028s
sys 0m0.016s
GitHub frontpage is very quick indeed, but browsing repos can sometimes have load times over a full second for me. Especially when it's less popular repos less likely to be in a cache.
Readit News
> [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1]
> [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [2]
> [2025-11-28T09:21:12Z] it’s abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it [3]
---
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127021007/https://ziglang.o...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127140447/https://ziglang.o...
3: https://web.archive.org/web/20251128092112/https://ziglang.o...
It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits. I commend them for their actions in doing what's best for the community at the cost of some personal mea culpa edits.
(He did post a kind of vague apology in https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p..., but it's ambiguous enough that anyone who was offended is free to read it as either retracting the offending accusation, or not. This is plausibly the best available alternative for survival in the current social-media landscape, because it's at best useless to apologize to a mob that's performatively offended on behalf of people they don't personally know, and usually counterproductive because it marks you as a vulnerable victim, but the best available alternative might still tend to weaken the kind of integrity we're talking about rather than strengthen it.)
I find the fact that this painting has been hung crooked by 0.00001º: down
I find torture and mass murder: down
Clearly this is a ridiculous state of affairs. There's more gradations available than this.
Possibly coloured by my dutch culture: I think this rewrite is terrible. The original sentence was vastly superior, though I think the first rewrite (newbies to rookies) was an improvement.
The zig team is alarmed, and finds this state of affairs highly noteworthy and would like to communicate this more emotional, gut instincty sense in their words.
There's a reason humans invent colourful language and epithets. They always do, in all languages. Because it's useful!
And this rewrite takes it out. That's not actually a good thing. The fact that evidently the internet is so culturally USA-ised that any slightly colourful language is instantly taken as a personal affront and that in turn completely derails the entire debate into a pointless fight over etiquitte and whether something is 'appropriate' is fucking childish. I wish it wasn't so.
In human communication, the US is somewhat notorious in how flattened its emotional range is of interaction amongst friendly folk. One can bring anthropology into it if one must: Loads of folks from vastly different backgrounds all moving to a vast expanse of land? Given that cultural misunderstanding is extremely likely and the cost of such a misunderstanding is disastrously high, best plaster a massive smile on your face and be as diplomatic as you can be!
Consider as a practical example: Linus Torvalds' many famed communications. "NVidia? Fuck you!" was good. It made clear, in a very, very pithy way, that Linus wasn't just holding a negative opinion about the quality and behaviour of the nvidia gfx driver team at the time, but that this negative opinion was universal across a broad range of concerns and extremely so. It caused a shakeup where one was needed. All in 3 little words.
(Possibly the fact that the internet in general is even more incapable of dealing with colourful language is not necessarily the fault of USification of the internet: The internet is a lot like early US, at least in the sense that the risk of cultural misunderstanding is far higher than in face to face communications on most places on the planet).
I appreciate that Andrew and the other Zig team members are really passionate about their project, their goals, and the ideals behind those goals. I was dismayed by the recent news of outbursts which do a lot to undermine their goals. That they’re listening to feedback and trying to take the high road (despite feeling a lot of frustration with the direction industry is taking) should be commended.
This is not a group with community or pragmatism from the start.
Indeed. The article even links to it.
https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p...
They sugarcoated the truth to a friendlier but less accurate soundbite is what they did.
Have people already forgotten that the ReactJS port made github slow ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861
The revised, politically-correct, sanitized re-framing that you apparently insist on does not convey this very important point of information.
We have freedom of speech for a reason - blunt honesty conveys important information. Passive language does not.
I mean, reason of "we don't want to be tied with direction MS takes" is good enough, not sure why they felt need to invent reasons and nitpick some near irrelevant things just to excuse their actions
Dead Comment
If they would own up to it and say sorry, then your point stands. But that's not what happened here.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
Thus spake zarathustra etc etc..
You need that middle-finger-to-everyone, "let me show you how it's really done" energy to build anything meaningful. Pretty much all the great builders I can think of in tech history are/were deeply angry people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114083
"I think that writing style is more LinkedIn than LLM, the style of people who might get slapped down if they wrote something individual.
Much of the world has agreed to sound like machines."
Eg,metaphors that make no sense or fail to contribute any meaningful insight or extrenely cliched phrases ("it was a dark and stormy night...") used seriously rather than for self-deprecating humor.
My favorite example of an AI tell was a youtube video about serial killers i was listening to for background noise which started one of its sentences with "but what at first seemed to be an innocent night of harmless serial murder quickly turned to something sinister."
It's just much easier now for "laypeople" to also adjust their style to this. My prediction is people will get quickly tired of it (as evidenced by your comment)
> More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys ...
vs
> Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs ...
I commend the author for correcting their mistakes. However, IMHO, an acknowledgement instead of just a silent edit would have been better.
Anyway, each to their own, and I'm happy for the Zig community.
Companies with heaps of cash are (over)paying "software engineers" to create and maintain it
Millions of people, unable to disable it, are "active users"
When I use Github servers I only use them to download source code, as zipballs or tarballs. I don't run any JS
The local forward proxy skips the redirects when downloading
Works for meCode folding is buggy. Have some functions that have inner functions or other foldable stuff like classes with methods and inside the method maybe some inner function? It will only show folding buttons sporadically, seemingly without pattern.
Also standard text editing stuff like "double click and drag" no longer properly works without issues/has weird effects and behavior. The inspection of identifiers interferes with being able to properly select text.
The issue search is stupid too, often doesn't find the things one searches for.
You must be logged in to search properly too.
Most of the functionality is tied to running that JavaScript.
In short, it shows typical signs of a platform that is more and more JavaScriptianized with bloated frameworks making things work half-assed and not properly tested for sane standard behavior.
But there is more. Their silly AI bots closing issues. "State bot". "Dependabot". All trash or half thought out annoying (mis-)features. Then recently I read here on HN, that apparently a project maintainer can edit another person's post! This reeks of typical Microsoft issues with permissions to do things and not properly thinking such a thing through. Someone internally must be pushing for all this crap.
Not to say their implementation doesn't suck. I just wouldn't know because even a non-buggy one would probably still be a subpar experience.
Linux seems to be doing fine.
I wouldn't personally care either way but it is non-obvious to me that the first version would actually hurt the community.
https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk
The normalization, in fact, has been quite successful. The entire silicon valley has tacitly approved of it.
You act like people arn't being rewarded for this type of behavior.
To me this kind of communication says it comes from a real person who has real experiences, not the marketing department, and is understandably angry at the people who make his life worse. And it's natural to insult those people. Insults are a signal, not noise. They signal something is wrong and people should pay attention to it.
I hear criticisms about being unprofessional and the like. So what? I don't wanna live in a world where everything everyone says is supposed to be filtered to match some arbitrary restrictions made up be people who more often than not can't do the work themselves.
Almost all of the actually competent people I personally know speak like this.
They can't stand those dragging us down through incompetence. They get angry when something that should work doesn't. They are driven by quality and will not be silent when it's lacking. If somebody fucked up, they will tell them they fucked up and have to fix it.
And I much prefer that approach.
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I was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I could tell, seems like a possibly immature teenager. But to have a whole community gang up on you with pitch forks because they have a suspicion you might use AI... that was gross to watch.
I was already turned off by the constant Zig spam approach to marketing. But now that we're getting pitchfork mobs and ranty anti-AI diatribes it just seems like a community sustaining itself on negative energy. I think they can possibly still turn it around but it might involve cleaning house or instituting better rules for contributors.
What makes you say that? Couldn’t it be an immature adult?
> because they have a suspicion you might use AI
Was that the reason? From what I remember (which could definitely be incomplete information) the complaint was that they were clearly using AI while claiming no AI had been used, stole code from another project while claiming it was their own, refused to add credit when a PR for that was made, tried to claim a namespace on open-vsx…
At a certain point, that starts to look outright malicious. It’s one thing to not know “the rules” but be willing to fix your mistakes when they are pointed out. It’s an entirely different thing to lie, obfuscate, and double down on bad attitude.
Your assumption is woefully incorrect. People were annoyed, when the explicit and repeated lie that the AI generated site he released which was mostly written by AI, was claimed to be AI free. But annoyed isn't why he was met with the condemnation he received.
In addition to the repeated lies, there's the long history of this account of typosquatting various groups, many, many crypto projects, the number of cursor/getcursor accounts, the license violation and copying code without credit from an existing community group (with a reputation for expending a lot of effort, just to help other zig users), the abusive and personal attack editing the PR asking, for nothing but crediting the source of the code he tried to steal. All the while asking for donations for the work he copied from others.
All of that punctuated by the the fact he seems to have plans to typo squat Zig users given he controls the `zigglang` account on github. None of this can reasonable be considered just a simple mistake on a bad day. This is premeditated malicious behavior from someone looking to leach off the work of other people.
People are mad because the guy is a selfish asshole, who has a clear history of coping from others, being directly abusive, and demonstrated intent to attempt to impersonate the core ziglang team/org... not because he dared to use AI.
I do think that it was weird to focus on the AI aspect so much. AI is going to pollute everything going forward whether you like it or not. And honestly who cares, either it is a good ressource for learning or it’s not. You have to decide that for yourself and not based on whether AI helped writing it.
However I think some of the critique was because he stole the code for the interactive editor and claimed he made it himself, which of course you shouldn’t do.
? what? from my experience zig marketing is pretty mid. it is nowhere at the level of rust.
heck, rust evangelism strikeforce made me hate rust and all the people promote it, even for now.
Zig people want Zig to "win". They are appearing on Hacker News almost every day now, and for that purpose this kind of things matters more than the language's merits themselves. I believe the language has a good share of merits though, far more than Rust, but it's too early and not battle tested to get so much attention.
we need less self censorship, not more.
It's not a binary choice between insults (escalates conflict, destabilizes rational decision making) vs hiding your opinions. That's what the word tact is for. It's simply, quite literally, a skill issue if someone can't find a middle ground between those two failure modes.
GitHub is critical infrastructure for many projects and pushing AI slop is not acceptable.
They have the money to pay for quality development time.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-...
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All in one, that's why developers like it so much. The obsession with AI makes me nervous, but the advantages still outweigh, as for me, the average developer. For now.
Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality, and like it or not are now part of modern software engineering. Developers are more likely to use a repo that has more stars than its alternatives.
I know that the code should speak for itself and one should audit their dependencies and not depend on Github stars, but in practice this is not what happens, we rely on the community.
I have no idea what the parent comment is talking about a "well-formed CI system." GitHub Actions is easily the worst CI tool I've ever used. There are no core features of GitHub that haven't been replicated by GitLab at this point, and in my estimation GitLab did all of it better. But, if I put something on GitLab, nobody sees it.
As for me, this does not negate the convenient things that I originally wrote about.
The previous popular free code hoster was Sourceforge, which eventually entered its what's now called "enshittifcation phase". Github was simply in the right place at the right time to replace Sourceforge and the rest is history.
I hate that this is perceived as generally true. Stars can be farmed and gamed; and the value of a star does not decay over time. Issues can be automatically closed, or answered with a non-response and closed. Numbers of followers is a networking/platform thing (flag your significance by following people with significant follower numbers).
> Developers are more likely to use a repo that has more stars than its alternatives.
If anything, star numbers reflect first mover advantage rather than code quality. People choosing which one of a number of competing packages to use in their product should consider a lot more than just the star number. Sadly, time pressures on decision makers (and their assumptions) means that detailed consideration rarely happens and star count remains the major factor in choosing whether to include a repo in a project.
In non-coding social circles, social proof is even more accepted. So, I think that for a large portion of codebases, social proof is enough.
They're NOT! Lots of trashy AI projects have +50k stars.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha...
??? Seriously?
> All these things are powerful indicators of quality
Not in my experience....
having used gerrit 10 years ago there's nothing about github's PRs that I like more, today.
> code navigation simply in a web browser
this is nice indeed, true.
> You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly.
if only. GHA are a hot mess because somehow we've landed in a local minimum of pretend-YAML-but-actually-shell-js-jinja-python and they have a smaller or bigger outage every other week, for years now.
> why developers like it so much
most everything else is much worse in at least one area and the most important thing it's what everyone uses. no one got fired for using github.
I've used Gerrit years ago, so wasn't totally unfamiliar, but it was still awkward to use when Go were using it for PRs. Notably that project ended up giving up on it because of the friction for users - and they were probably one of the most likely cases to stick to their guns and use something unusual.
I love patch stack review systems. I understand why they're not more popular, they can be a bit harder to understand and more work to craft, but it's just a wonderful experience once you get them. Making my reviews work in phabricator made my patchsets in general so much better, and making my patchsets better have improved my communication skills.
It's fine for code review in a team, not really good in GH-like "a user found a bug, fixed it, and want to send it" contribution scheme
Man :| no. I genuinely understand the convenience of using Actions, but it's a horrible product.
Am I missing a truly better alternative or CI systems simply are all kind of a pita?
Every time.
It feels to me like people have become way too reliant on this (in particular, forcing things into CI that could easily be done locally) and too trusting of those runners (ISTR some reports of malware).
>In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser.
I've always found their navigation quite clunky and glitchy.
IMHO the vanilla Github UI sucks for code browsing since it's incredibly slow, and the search is also useless (the integrated web-vscode works much better - e.g. press '.' inside a Github project).
> as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners
The only good thing about the Github CI system are the free runners (including free Mac runners), for everything else it's objectively worse than the alternatives (like Gitlab CI).
GitHub's evolution as a good open source hosting platform stalled many years ago. Its advantages are its social network effects, not as technical infrastructure.
But from a technology and UX POV it's got growing issues because of this emphasis, and that's why the Zig people have moved, from what I can see.
I moved my projects (https://codeberg.org/timbran/) recently and have been so far impressed enough. Beyond ideological alignment (free software, distaste for Microsoft, want to get my stuff off US infrastructure [elbows up], etc.) the two chief advantages are that I could create my own "organization" without shelling over cash, and run my own actions with my own machines.
And since moving I haven't noticed any drop in engagement or new people noticing the project since moving. GitHub "stars" are a shite way of measuring project success.
Forgejo that's behind Codeberg is similar enough to GitHub that most people will barely notice anyways.
I'm personally not a fan of the code review tools in any of them (GitLab, Foregejo, or GitHub) because they don't support proper tracking of review commits like e.g. Gerritt does but oh well. At least Foregejo / Codeberg are open to community contribution.
How do you define "code navigation"? It might've got a bit easier with automatic highlighting of selected symbols, but in return source code viewer got way too laggy and, for a couple of years now, it has this weird bug with misplaced cursors if code is scrolled horizontally. I actually find myself using the "raw" button more and more often, or cloning repo even for some quick ad-hoc lookups.
Edit: not to mention the blame view that actively fights with browser's built in search functionality.
Having used Forgejo with AGit now, IMO the PR experience on GitHub is not great when trying to contribute to a new project. It's just unnecessarily convoluted.
They have zero fees for individuals too which is amazing. Thanks to it I gained my first sponsor when one of my projects was posted here. Made me wish sponsorships could pay the bills.
Is there more?
That's not a Victorinox you're looking at, it's a cheap poorly made enshittified clone using a decades old playbook (e-e-e).
The focus on "Sponsorship buttons" and feature instead of fixing is just a waste of my time.
Dead Comment
Nov 22, 2025 https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-u...
Quotes from their website:
Infrastructure status [...] We are running on 3 servers, one Gigabyte and 2 Dell servers (R730 and R740).
Here's their current hardware: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/meta/src/branch...
[...] Although aged, the performance (and even energy efficiency) is often not much worse than with new hardware that we could afford. In the interest of saving embodied carbon emissions from hardware manufacturing, we believe that used hardware is the more sustainable path.
[...] We are investigating how broken Apple laptops could be repurposed into CI runners. After all, automated CI usage doesn't depend on the same factors that human beings depend on when using a computer (functioning screen, speakers, keyboard, battery, etc.). If you own a broken M1/M2 device or know someone who does, and believe that it is not worth a conventional repair, we would be happy to receive your hardware donation and give it a try!
[...] While it usually holds up nicely, we see sudden drop in performance every few days. It can usually be "fixed" with a simple restart of Forgejo to clear the backlog of queries.
Gives both early-Google as well as hackerspace vibes, which can or can not be a good thing.
Their reliability is not great unfortunately. Currently their 24h uptime is 89% for the main site. They are partially degraded right now.
The 14 day uptime is 98% but I think that’s actually because some of their auxiliary systems have great uptime, the main site is never that great it seems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131693
Deleted Comment
https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg
I would even consider that moving everything from one single point of failure to an other is not the brightest move.
Github does offer a self hosted product: GitHub Enterprise Server
1. use git or jj
2. pull-request like data lives on the network
3. They have a UI, but anyone can also build one and the ecosystem is shared
I've been considering Gerrit for git-codereview, and tangled will be interesting when private data / repos are a thing. Not trying to have multiple git hosts while I wait
I've been self-hosting it for a few years now and can definitely recommend. It has been very reliable. I even have a runner running. Full tutorial at https://huijzer.xyz/posts/55/installing-forgejo-with-a-separ....
I believe the correct question is "Why they are getting DDoSed this much if they are not something important?"
For anyone who wants to follow: https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg
Even their status page is under attack. Sorry for my French, but WTF?
What does this mean for the Zig project? I haven't heard of Codeberg, they may be great, but for a popular open-source project I'd expect a proper discussion before deciding to move or weighing the pros and cons of different hosting options. From what I'm hearing, Zig is technically excellent but seems to lack level‑headed, mature leadership. That's not unique: many open‑source projects started by brilliant engineers struggle as they grow and need a new leadership structure. That transition can be painful and could even harm adoption.
Then I think the larger point I'd make is that it's impossible to get anyone to care. We've let tech giants like MS become so large they can essentially just ignore problems with their service, and as a customer, it does not matter that you are paying for it, or how much you pay, you're essentially nothing to MS. You pay not only in the direct cost of the product, but in the indirect costs of any problem with the product will hit you; e.g., here, with VMs just spinning due to really basic bugs. But you're right, nobody ever got fired for using Github.
The big "pro" of moving to a smaller platform to me, I hope, is that they're at least incentivized to help you succeed.
One reason I think most CI scripts should just be — as much as possible — scripts, in the literal sense, is that not only promotes running them locally, it also promotes moving to other CI platforms.
That's more of a you problem really.
> I'd expect a proper discussion before deciding to move
And you know the discussion did not happen?
Dead Comment
Sorry to be blunt, but you've said nothing of substance. To address the actual criticism you need to explain why these specific "inexcusable bugs" they cite are excusable from your perspective. Otherwise if the whole website doesn't function for months your statement "bugs exist, fixed slower than we'd like" would also apply and be just as meaningless
I guarantee that in ~24 months, most AI features will still remain in some form or another on most apps, but the marketing language of AI-first will have evaporated entirely.
Where have you been the last 15 years? However, I agree with your prediction. Coke making AI advertisements may have had cache a couple years ago, but now would be a doofus move.
On the other hand "personalized ads" is still going strong despite the entire concept being offensive.
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65343
At any rate, the feed is still available and you can reach it via browser autocomplete. I open GitHub by typing "not" in my URL bar and landing on the notifications page.
Night and day compared to something like Linear.
Here are my results for what it's worth