There was a post from Github a few weeks ago showing commit volume exploded from linear to exponential growth about 6 months ago. I don't know for sure, but I think they weren't ready for the scale out. Whether that means actual scaling issues or cost cutting because of the scale out, who knows.

Everyone producing magnitude more code with AI agents. Numbers from GH COO here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

So why aren't we seeing an explosion in feature shipping rate, or tech startups?

If there is so much extra code, where is it going? Is everyone just creating giant piles of throwaway slop?

I'm curious, do people around you use AI? Because in my own workplace, people use lots of AI, and they ship lots of PRs, which correspond to actual features on the roadmap. I've been doing this a long time, and there is a whole lotta stuff shipping. I'm a manager and in the handful of hours I have I'm shipping the equivalent of what I would have as a full-time eng years ago.

> Is everyone just creating giant piles of throwaway slop?

yes, like the crypto or productivity 'industry', where every project exists to manage your other crypto and productivity projects, the dynamic of 'AI programming' seems to be to make software to manage your other two dozen AI things

mysteriously enough, big open source projects that people actually use in the real world aren't seeing their issues closed at any higher rates, almost as if that requires actual maintenance and programming (which Fred Brooks told us this half a century ago)

Something something staff reductions something

Part of it is additional load. Part of it is their move of more and more of Github infrastructure to Azure.

I've done a lot of "plain compute" work [0] with the Big Three Cloud Compute vendors. Azure is by far the worst. Mysterious resource creation failures, mysterious resource deletion failures, mysterious "incompatible schema" failures when talking to Azure provisioning and status infrastructure, mysterious and inexplicable performance problems, etc, etc, etc. Unless I was being paid a lot of money to use Azure, I'd take Google's legendarily nonexistent support over Azure's unreliability any day.

[0] That is, "create a VM with persistent disks, Internet access, and maybe a load balancer in front and ignore all of the other features provided by the vendor"