I think this would cut out a lot of the mindless commit activity.

Charge $1/month per repo. If your project isn't worth that, run your own git or use another free forge.

GH isn't good enough to charge that much for its core services. 90% of its user base would just find better or cheaper alternatives, and the only ones remaining would be legacy enterprise codebases that are just impossible or too expensive to migrate.

I think GitHub leans on this free repos thing a lot for getting new users though. Like I could see people just moving to GitLab

…and encountering the same issues most likely.

Fair, but the point is GitHub’s model is:

Free Users use GitHub => when a company needs source control => all their coders use GitHub => company buys expensive enterprise contract.

If there’s less of an advantage to using free GitHub then that funnel works less effectively.

Free private repos on github is relatively new, only introduced after a rise in popularity of gitlab (which has free private repos).

Seems like github is too popular for itself.

I know you said "relatively", but it's been seven and a half years: https://github.blog/changelog/2019-01-08-pricing-changes/

80/20 rule would suggest that you don't need to apply $1 to all users, just those who create an excessive number of AI slop repos or make an excessive number of commits.

Could do similar for GH actions usage.

What about $1/year per private repo?

The incentives that creates are really bad: it encourages users to organize their code across the smallest number of repos, and I'd bet anything that larger repos are disproportionately more expensive for GitHub than smaller ones. It's very possible that a per-repo charge would make things worse.

You are way too optimistic. What will realistically happen is they charge $2 per month and the quality doesn't change. The $2 per month gross will go where it always goes: launches, exec salaries, shareholders.

I would have thought it's public repos that got the most AI slop recently as a form of gathering karma and boost CVs. It would be nice to know if private repo commits increased instead.

A lot of private repos are probably just taking up cheap storage space, not seeing activity that would cause additional load.

You can also limit number of free commits to, say 100 per month.

So if I want to push an existing project with 1000 commits to GitHub for the first time, I gotta do it over the course of 10 months?

Encouraging big commits seems antithetical to the idea of git in general.

Public or private doesn't matter. Vibe coders aren't worried about others using their AI slop