Instead of creating one more centralized alternative, it's best to invest all effort into a decentralized solution, like Radicle[1][2] or federated Forgejo[3][4].
I feel like this misses the value of something like Github or Origin entirely though. There's nothing terribly difficult about hosting a git server. The UX and pull requests capabilities are a little involved, but there are alternatives today.
What makes Github special is the ecosystem and integrations. Sentry, Linear, and so many other tools have special UX around Github. You need centralization (or at the very least, a standard) for that.
It sucks to see Github's fall from grace, but I just can't bring myself to use a service like this under the custody of SpaceX. I've been saying this for a while, but I really wish Linear would swoop in and become the unified platform for software development.
It sucks to see Github's fall from grace, but I just can't bring myself to use a service like this under the custody of SpaceX.
Agreed. It's like going from bad to worse. Not to mention, Origin doesn't even support actions. They are doing the easiest part of git hosting and no mention of anything that actually makes Github what it is. What Origin is offering is literally a weekend project, and anything having to do with Elon is arguably one of the least trustworthy organizations in whatever industry he chooses to participate in. No, thank you.
This is going nowhere. GitLab is the cautionary tale. Massive funding, nine figures of ARR, years of losses, and most of the revenue comes from self-managed enterprise licenses rather than the SaaS. If the best-funded attempt lands there, I don't see how this one goes anywhere when they have not even a minimum viable product and reputational issues right out of the gate.
The thing with Gitlab is probably that it had to deal with the network effect/winner takes all conundrum. GitHub was first on the scene, it was the first to make a centralised hub popular and it has had the custom of many notable open source projects.
Gitlab as a product is miles ahead of GitHub at this point. (Except at the point of scaling very large repositories I gather.) There is just very little money in saas beside the bespoke enterprise contracts.
I’m not sure how revenue between GitHub and Gitlab compared before the Microsoft acquisition and now but GitHub has always leaned on being the popular tool with the network.
In theory, sure, but the reality is that "development activity" revolves around "codebase". Plenty of projects have separate bug tracker, source code control and CI system. Most people likely prefer GitHub's all-in-one solution, especially for small-medium open source projects.
And do we not see how terrible this is as a result? Hitching your tent to corporations, especially American corporations, is always an exercise in misery.
I recently had to rebuild a jira frontend from scratch just so a single jira tab didn't take down my 8gb MacBook. Support only the subset of features I actually use and it's great. Makes me hate jira even more.
I disagree. The integrated workflow of actions, issues, code review and source control is a huge productivity win. There’s a reason people chase a “single pane of glass”.
A website where one views and interacts with all of these things does not necessitate that all of these things run on the same system. Since this most recent GitHub outage, I'm looking into modularizing my git server, issues, and actions; there's no reason why one going down should bring down all the others.
SO a company Github's size can't handle the slop they invested a lot to enable and this is not a failure? I mean if the market moves and you cannot move with it, what do we call it?
I'm sure that sentry and co could spend a few bucks and commit a KPI in one of their upcoming quarters to figure out the activity pub spec and support integrating with it if their hearts desired. It's a chicken egg problem and we all know chickens exist. It's clear that the centralized model is getting left behind, especially as the EU is moving away from US services and they continue to invest in open source, European-based alternatives like Codeberg and Forgejo.
The communication protocol is not what I mean here. The feature-sets and capabilities around "pull requests", "reviews", "comments", "checks", "issues", "projects", "deployments", "releases", etc are all different across platforms. You have to integrate bespoke for each platform. There is no universal standard for how CI/CD, deployment tracking, project management, etc are done.
Yes, Sentry or whoever else could build a Codeberg integration, or a Forgejo one, or a Gitlab one. But these would all be bespoke. There is no standard. So the one with the biggest market share ends up with the most integrations. This is where we are today.
I'm all for open standards. But I don't even know of a proposal for such a standard.
Sure, with AI tooling, you can vibe code your own browser extensions or other integrations in some cases. But for a lot of platforms, that just won't cut it. That's before we even get into the maintenance burden of that.
Unlike GitHub's universal standard? Forgejo already has a near 1:1 github action format for forgejo actions. You can even use github actions in forgejo. You cant have AI build it out for a few tokens? Why are you so certain of failure?
Interfaces exist in programming languages. The strategy pattern is one of the gang of four patterns. I'm sure a good engineer or an AI can figure it all out or is that too hopeful? Unless Sentry engineers or AI are too incompetent to make adapters? I hope not, the market is in big trouble if a dev tooling org cant make tools for where devs are
That used to be a big deal. I don't think it is anymore.
One great thing about the rise of AI is that now it's super easy to make and maintain integrations. This is a place where AI coding uniquely shines due to the points being well defined and mostly quite standard.
This is going to hurt the monopoly power of software companies. But it'll be great for allowing the proliferation of smaller companies, open source, and home grown solutions.
I'm already seeing the pendulum swinging back to local first instead of cloud services.
As someone who has some SaaS products that must connect to other SaaS products, I can tell you that this is somewhere that AI saved me a truck load of time.
A lot of SaaS companies change their API in subtle ways throughout the months probably too rapidly. GraphQL schema changes, splitting apart one api endpoint into 2, changes to authentication method required. A thousand little cuts.
This used to be my biggest time waster. Now it's barely on my radar. Life changing for me. I guess your mileage may vary.
Concurrently, the writing is on the wall for us SaaS product providers - lower margins, and more competition for the same reasons. I welcome it. More quality and choice at a better price for everyone.
At the same time, I think some kind of aggregator will emerge. In music, the tools to create music are so inexpensive that the market is flooded. In games it is becoming the same, now accelerated by LLMs. But there is always some type of aggregator ending up earning the money from most of that, rather than the people creating the content. Not sure how it will work out here, but I predict it will be another type of aggregator.
I think people often forget that GitHub is really more akin to a social network than it is a software development tool.
By that I mean the stuff that makes GitHub great is all the same stuff that originally made social networks exciting (back before the algorithm was tuned into a horrifying cycle of negativity).
except when you are paying for their enterprise edition - and they make no distinction between paying customers (quite a bit actually once you add in actions costs + their other addons, it's quite a bit of money) and their free tier full of AI slop PRs on rando projects.
As someone who pays github, I'm super annoyed at the downtime and still I'm getting charged for actions running that all fail from their lack of concern for their enterprise customers.
Having some independent pools of capacity for paying vs. free customers isn't rocket science, it's basic competence (or care). I'm quite sure their are competent people remaining at GitHub (although I hear most of their original folks have left, and the 2nd tier of folks who joined from microsoft seem lackluster at best). I chalk this up to lack of care, or hubris, or both.
Oh I agree that the outages are unacceptable regardless of their “social media origin”.
I also don’t buy their excuse that it’s due to increased loads due to AI. If that were the case then we’d see more patterns to the outages. But instead it affects all GitHub systems but at different times. It feels more like a problem with their orchestration layer than capacity issues.
I think the UX around pull requests and code reviews are extremely difficult to get right and to this day I haven't seen a platform that I'm really happy with.
There are bits and pieces in some places but none really bring stuff together.
Here a small list of things I'd like to see:
- diffs should be language aware and highlight semantic differences
- I should have a working LSP on both the old and the new version simultaneously and have decent full editor code navigation features and git history inspection available
- I want ergonomic ways to see diffs between different versions of commits
- I would like to be able to comment on anything (commit messages, inter diffs, PR description, responses, etc.)
- I want a better integration of LLM reviews than having them dump their findings in an a big PR comment
I think there is plenty or room to innovate on just the basics of PR and codereview.
> What makes Github special is the ecosystem and integrations. Sentry, Linear, and so many other tools […]
github didn’t start with those things. Those things came with adoption.
Its like all those people who bemoan their favourite software not existing on Linux as a reason not to switch, completely oblivious to the fact that this hegemony is the reason linux doesn’t have that software.
It’s like an appeal to the status quo - its self fulfilling, impossible to break.
I am working on a GitHub compatible API for my code forge at https://juju.bi, and thus all the existing integrations of GitHub should theoretically work with my code forge too.
> What makes Github special is the ecosystem and integrations. Sentry, Linear, and so many other tools have special UX around Github. You need centralization (or at the very least, a standard) for that.
I think “a standard” is the key here. There is no reason why integrations must work through a proprietary centralized service.
> You need centralization (or at the very least, a standard) for that.
We have a standard! It’s this great decentralized VCS called git. For most of the stuff integrations do, they’re just showing code or commits — both of which are readily available in a copy of the repo.
Probably the one thing that’s missing is a standardized webhook system so that your git repo storage could tell integrations when stuff changes. Though even that isn’t strictly necessary if the integrations keep a copy of the repo up to date.
Git is absolutely miserable without things that GitHub, GitLab, and others provide, and there's still a huge ceiling to grow into in terms of layering on UX on top of Git.
In my opinion, Git is holding software development back. Git only cares about lines of text. This is not enough in today's world.
> I've been saying this for a while, but I really wish Linear would swoop in and become the unified platform for software development.
And then, 5 years later, we are back at square one when everybody uses Linear and they start going the fate of GitHub. Self-hostable, standardized alternatives are the only real sustainable solution.
Centralizations were prerequisites to have nice integrations. Yet, what used to be a precious plugin now (more than often) is a 15 min vibe coding warmup.
git is such a good platform for decentralized tech. Forfeiting that advantage is just criminal. What I really want (and almost have) is a local GitHub for me and agents. With 4+ orchestrators working with a ton of subagents, things get difficult to coordinate. Several days ago, I went back to plain git and it was real slow and abrasive to work with.
With some wizardry applied, I effectively have an "Excel for worktrees", a very productive and low-friction environment. https://replicated.live/blog/crdt
You don't sacrifice decentralization when you use Github. You can still do all the same decentralized stuff, have other copies of the repo, do everything offline, directly pull from other checkouts, etc. Github can just be ONE of the places you push your code to, it doesn't have to be the only place.
Yeah, it seems disingenuous to pretend to care so deeply about decentralization while misunderstanding git to the point they don’t even realise none of that goes away because you also push to GitHub
I just use git with a remote and a custom CI system. The whole thing is trivial to build. All these forgejo etc are kind of over complicated software. Open Office of the modern world.
I think the biggest value of choosing gitlab is the social network. I think federation is the right way, but it seems a mastodon vs linkedin problem. Would be good if there would be bridges between all those fediverses. A nice one is also ngit [0]
Forgejo federation being mentioned each time never stops being silly. It hasn't been a thing for years, and they don't appear to have made any meaningful progress to show for.
Cursor, which is now owned by Elon, who tried very hard to get all manner of data about citizens with his intrusions? I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this isn't a great idea. He'll use it to feed Grok.
I'm not a big fan of Github right now either but I wouldn't consider this alternative due to its ownership chain.
Considering that Grok CLI was caught uploading peoples entire codebases... Yeah, I have little faith and trust. I wanted to try Cursor and Grok but I won't because of this.
I still wonder how it should work otherwise if the "AI" is not running locally - it needs to see the codebase & because it runs somewhere remote in a cloud then it needs to copy the codebase over.
I'm rather surprised people would expect it work any different for non-local "AI".
I wouldn't even feel comfortable cloning from it, let alone contributing. If you decide to host your project there, please mirror it somewhere sane as well.
If you actually believe that he didn't, you are, at best, out of touch.
His little "DOGE" endeavor was actively caught exfiltrating personal data about everyone in the country, and the first thing that happened after SpaceX acquired Cursor was pumping all of the data Cursor had acquired into Grok training.
He is quite literally the shining example of "Imma do what I want, even if it's against my own terms of service or otherwise illegal, and then you can try to sue me over it later".
I dunno how it is in America, but in my country if the largest individual donor was granted carte blanche to run his own department within the administration, with his own people, answerable only to the head of the government, it would cause a helluva lot of outrage.
Don't really get the incredulity considering he needs to justify the tens of billions already spent on AI infrastructure by, you know, training a model or two ...
I feel like the "GitHub is a mess" conversation is a little forced at times - I spend a significant portion of my work day in GitHub and while there have been an uptick in outages lately, it still feels like a very solid platform.
I guess I personally wouldn't categorize it as a "mess" and the conversations I read about it here make me think I'm using an entirely different product than everyone else.
It feels to me like this is a case of very rapid increase in load from AI pr's more than product quality degrading because of cruft or poor maintenance. It's annoying but I'm not confident that alternatives will do better in the long run vs GitHub (which I'm guessing will improve with time)
Yeah and if I was an enterprise I would definitely be self hosting with Forgejo or Gerrit or whatever. But I think for most hobbyists GitHub is still totally fine.
I use it quite a lot and the first time I actually witnessed downtime myself was yesterday.
github for hobbyists and small orgs and simple open source projects is wonderful.
github for large project that rely on CI tool is a nightmare (cost, downtime, etc.)
I'm guessing you dont know about the github actions bug that was running and endless loop consuming 100% cpu costing orgs insane amounts of money that they didn't fix for 3 years.
I love to hate on Github/Microsoft as much as the next person, but considering the insane amount of code being pushed to it every day, I'd say they're doing quite well.
Anecdotally: at work I saw quite a lot of github-uptime-related issues, and because they're the central host for everything they become *cough* load bearing for a huge amount of the company. Stability and performance has been dramatically worse than the self-hosted phabricator+gitolite before it.
I'd emphasize their practices as being the culprit.
Migrating to different cloud vendors, while difficult, is something that people have done many times before. There's only finite number of incongruences that appear when moving cloud vendors. It's rather difficult to explain the ongoing problems several years after the fact.
Anyone that's worked at a startup knows that one of the best things about it is reflecting on all of the asinine, if not genuinely stupid policies of your previous employer so as not to repeat them. Without any insider knowledge, the practices and procedures GitHub had prior to acquisition probably look nothing like those post-acquisition.
I’ve heard from people who left GitHub that Microsoft pulled all their best dev ops people to work on AI scaling. This is blatant disinvestment by Microsoft bc they think GitHub is untouchable. I hope better alternatives than musk come up
It's falling apart at the seams for me. Half the time I click somewhere on a page, the whole thing freezes and I have to reload the page. Took forever to install neovim on a new machine today because all the plugins installed via Github and I had to wait like 10 minutes for it to come back up.
Earlier today our app, used by a handful of actual production customers, went down for 30 minutes due to a GCP migration to a new project and we screwed up a secret in prod. This was an all hands on deck firedrill with 5 whys and incident reports and chaos.
Github has been having major production outages routinely! There are companies who can't release, can't build, can't view issues, basically can't work. I'd imagine most orgs using Github have been forced to move off of them or create an alternate approach to actually get shit done.
Git is objectively better than Subversion. The problem is we are conflating a widely used hosting service with the underlying SCM. We don't need github to use git successfully. Sure, it's nice, but you can install Forgejo or something, which is the exact same boat we were in with Subversion + Trac. You can have that experience right now if you want to.
What github is good for is discovery, getting contributions on open source projects (because it's so popular), and integrations. If you wanted to, you could host your open source project on Forgejo and use github as a mirror just to benefit from the visibility and get contributions.
100% not a chance for me. I'd rather host it myself on a Pi on a 56k dialup connection with 12% uptime then ever let an Elon related company touch my code.
This is the correct answer, but let me add a corolarium, both github, whatever cursor launches and any other bigco does obeys to the same friking iron law: *MAKE MONEY/POWER AT ANY COST, MONEY/POWER IS THE OBJECTIVE*, so you will get EXACTLY the same result from each one of them given enough time has passed.
Or Perforce. Perforce, in my experience, just worked. It also has sane conceptual names for things, a good CLI, SDKs, visual tools, cool features like workspaces that Git completely lacks, etc.
Bastard thing corrupted some of my source code that was "on a shelf". Just gone, no path to retrieving, reimplement it. About a decade ago now and I'm still angry about it. Don't lose the work is table stakes for source control.
My understanding is that Perforce is really strong in the game development industry, right? I think it handles blob/large file assets better or something like that.
You do know you can run git on your own machine, on pretty much any Linux/Unix based server, run it entirely peer-to-peer if you wish... or use Gitlab, including self-hosted Gitlab, or one of many other Git based servers?
Yeah. I just don't really like git. The user interface is dog shit, merging is nasty, it's really easy to blow your own toes off and it's generally horrible. The only reason it got anywhere was github.
There's other stuff out there. You don't have to use it except when you're working with someone who does and there are other systems with some compatibility for that exact scenario.
Git became popular because Linus Torvalds created it and it's used for the Linux kernel. If it can succeed there then it's battle proven for sure and that's why people pick it. Almost no one is working at that scale though so don't sweat it. Use what you want.
Mercurial was pretty nice back in the day and I think people still use it. If I was going to use something other than git these days, I'd probably take a look at fossil. That thing is so damn cool. You don't even need something like github with that because it's literally built into the fossil binary. And when I say binary, I mean a single, standalone binary for the whole thing.
Among many other things he has openly suggested that the EU should be abolished and national sovereignties restored and donated to parties that tow that line.
That makes very little sense to me. When your Subversion server is gone, you're hosed. When your Git forge is down, you take any old SSH shell account anywhere, push and keep working.
I like Musk companies more than most here it seems, I think he’s a net positive to the world. But (admittedly sans hard evidence) he absolutely gives me the vibe he’d train on my source code without my permission. I simply don’t trust him in this arena.
So there is more to lose than just the service being unreliable.
As a person he's either a poser or a neo-nazi.
As a government agent he's responsible for many deaths and as of yet untold harm.
Tesla was one of the earliest EV manufacturers, but these days they're overpriced and will be remembered for panel gaps and being destroyed by a car wash.
SpaceX has done a lot for that sector, but will mostly be remembered as the company that fucked astrophotography with 10s of thousands of satellites.
And Twitter has been dragged into irrelevance so badly it was being called a "reverse startup."
Neuralink seems to be going nowhere...
I can forgive him ransacking the federal government, exploiting workers in everything he does, building data centers that pollute like a cartoon villain, backing a fascist takeover of the US and similar ones all over the world, and openly sig-heiling, but I can't forgive him training on my source code!!!
GitHub's wikis are just git repositories with folders full of Markdown files. That's the easiest thing to pull out of GitHub. Just git clone the wiki repo. At that point I often just use a git headless merge to merge the second repo into the main repo under a docs/wiki/ folder or similar.
As I recall, in GHE I remember finding that you could even turn off the repo's wiki at that point and then reset it to point to your docs/wiki/ folder and still have the Wiki interface but pointing it to a branch in the same repository. That was a while ago and I don't know if it is still supported in GHE. I also remember it was work managing that wiki branch because Wikis didn't directly support PR workflows if you have branch protection policies. Also from the documentation it doesn't look like it is supported in Public GitHub right now, which seems a shame to me, as someone who likes all documentation in the same repo as the source. I haven't needed Wikis in public GitHub much, so I haven't tried to do anything like point them to a main repo branch.
This feels like an attempt to get more of Musk's non-coder fans to start vibe coding slop-products. "You can now code with Grok via Cursor and host your code on Origin, all without leaving Daddy Elon's ecosystem."
You could argue that you don't care what Claude does after work hours as long as it works your hours as you expect it to. Grok clearly failed the latter.
Obviously it didn't. It's the current value king and trails fable by single percents. And people shout of an obvious debug flag left on, something that can hardly be called rogue considering how notable it was.
Anthropic use Deepseek behind the scenes instead of their own models, whenever they feel like it. People have shared outputs from Claude that show internal tool errors the models have accidently returned with Deepseek error codes.
He’s trying to do his job and the angry mob predictably came in to bully an easy target about unrelated things. Just take a look at some of the (thankfully flagged, mostly) responses.
I'm going through and flagging the guideline-breaking comments (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348639) - I'd encourage you to do that, too, to help preserve the quality of HN.
Thanks, every Musk-related thread on HN is like this, it's very tiresome. We get it, the man is controversial but I'm not on HN to read reddit-like kneejerk comments, I want to read insightful and technical ones.
We don't get to use technology for technologies sake, and pretend it doesn't have social and political consequences or connections. Musk touched a lot of lives when he ransacked the federal government. A LOT of lives. Expecting people forget that because of some SaaS dev tools, or even a new EV, is a lot to ask.
I hope you don't actually believe that USAID helped lives, it's literally a propaganda arm of the government directly intervening in the politics of other countries and being a covert operation for murder and financing dictatorships. That Americans think that sacking it costs "millions of African's lives" is the pinnacle of comedy.
Point your ire towards actual decision makers and leaders who aren't making themselves available for questions. Trying to gotcha a IC who is bound by non disparagement clauses and risks loss of employment for speaking out over the decisions of those far above him is ridiculous.
you are asking a presumably IC or IC-ish worker on decisions that are out of their control or things that should be directed to sales people or the legal people
we all have worked on software. we all know we aren't exactly the best people to point to ToS or how decisions are made higher up from us
What I don't understand from the blog post is what's different in this offering than github - is it just the agentic tie ins where I can ask my agent to make changes while browsing the PR?
Are there any fundamental differences, ie ways of working that solve the worktrees problem?
We wanted to release a beta so people could start experimenting with our scalability and extensibility themselves. Over the next few weeks, you can expect a handful of features starting to change source control to better understand and work with agents.
Are there any plans for compatibility with GitHub's APIs?
I have a lot of dev tooling which assumes code is stored on public GitHub and/or GitHubEnterprise. This produces some degree of lock-in, in that all that code would have to be rewritten to migrate to something else. (Yes, AIs can help, but they still don't make migration effortless.)
The major Git hosters tend to implement roughly the same concepts, albeit with lots of little variations. It would be great if there were some sort of standardised API everyone implemented. In the absence of that, it makes sense for people to emulate the incumbent's APIs as a de facto standard, just like how other vendors copy OpenAI's APIs for talking to LLMs.
It seems to have 2 way sync of PRs, issues, issue comments etc, so it must be pretty much the same data model, so they could probably have a compatible API.
are they? given this has been happening frequently over past year and there's been minimal clear communication on their end on how they plan to address this
Azure is at capacity; GH offers a lot of services for free or heavily discounted. Especially when its public repo. These aren't profit generating for Microsoft, so they are not the priority with the capacity Azure has available. GH is probably struggling with these capacity and budget constraints. They also still have some AWS and non-azure DCs in use.
Once Azure's massive spend is online things will slowly get better.
I think GH/Microsoft got caught by surprise to the huge usage number increase as a result of LLMs. Microsoft started rolling all of its DCs to OpenAI around 2019-2020 to begin LLM training, then we saw a huge GH increase in late 2024 and Azure was just out of capacity for infinite GH scale.
There isn't and if there is it probably doesn't matter in GH's case. People are just speculating with zero knowledge.
I'd never put my data on anything owned by Musk. Period. I'd take lower availability from GitHub or a worse alternative (feature-wise) than move Origin.
The idea is that it's like Github but it stays up even as your commit/CI frequency increases. As a customer I'm stoked and looking forward to fully switching over as that's exactly what I want.
What's the biggest differentiator to GitHub (other than uptime). I keep hearing something along the lines of "GitHub for Agents" but would be great to hear from the devs of Origin what they actually think it means in tangible features/functionality?
Today, very little. We're intentionally releasing this as a Github alternative where we meet them toe-to-toe on functionality.
Over the next few weeks you can expect a lot more from us on integrations with agents, understanding agent-written code (without having to read through all of the code), and automatically getting your PRs to a mergable state. Stay tuned :)
So, a complex, vibe-coded platform that was prematurely pushed out to opportunistically take advantage of GitHub's egg-on-face moment? But it doesn't do anything better? And it's owned by the same guy who routinely takes shortcuts that causes both EVs and rockets to crash? Sign me up!
Just downvote and flag and move on. "Who hurt you" just encourages bad actors to behave worse (and isn't particularly good for itself). Repeatedly flag-killing their comments tends to teach a better lesson about what conduct is acceptable.
Probably the ever-increasing corporate homogenization, sanitization, and empty words that are flooding the internet (only accelerated by LLMs, of course). Which, for readers playing along at home, is kind of antithetical to the "hacker spirit."
Would love if you focus on performance. A big reason I have to have custom software is that agents can act much faster than humans but SaaS software is usually not well-designed enough to handle high RPS so rate-limits are low. I can easily outperform commercial hosts myself. At the least, it would be sick to have separate tenancy so that I could absolutely slam my own instance without having to deal with some other chump complaining.
This is really interesting to me as someone who has always cared more about performance/responsiveness than most people (and the market).
I'm sure folks would be interested to hear about what types of SaaS you've replaced for perf reasons, especially if you'd be willing to go back to a paid SaaS offering that was very responsive with agent-scale rate limits.
Completely unrelated to Origin, but are there plans for closer integration of Graphite with Cursor? A combined product would be a very compelling product, but not much seems to have changed since the acquisition.
are you maybe also planning to do cross device/cloud realtime sync like a mutagen feature set kind of? so cloud and local agents can work faster together?
this could be helpful on larger cross platform products/repos (maybe too overfitted on my use case, since i am working across multiple devices (ssh works but the repo code sync is a bit of an overhead with multiple agents and devices that could be better))
Cool but irrelevant. I was a paying user of Cursor until it got acquired by Musk. Ethical concerns about Grok aside, that's probably the least trustworthy person to be affiliated with when it comes to anything with any level of confidentiality.
So, I guess, do you have any illusions of attracting international customers who aren't online edgelords?
I think there are a large number of people I’d trust with my code before Musk, and some of them are already running public Git repo hosting.
xAI was caught uploading any repo their coding agent touched to their storage only last month. This isn’t about Musk’s ideology: it’s about his trustworthiness. He sincerely believes he’s the only person who can save the world and that allows him to justify an awful lot of moral lapses.
What kind of enforceable guarantees could we actually get that xAI won't use our private code for training? Not empty promises, guarantees that have legal teeth. This applies to anything with xAI or Cursor though, especially after last months' revelation that Cursor was uploading every repo it touched.
Not in the same way really. There aren't examples of OpenAI, Anthropic, or GitHub/Microsoft doing the sketchy things that xAI has been involved with. Those companies care a lot about the reputational damage that would come from flouting their customer's data privacy obligations.
Cursor/xAI was making a full copy of every repo it ever touched within the last month, and when caught, just acted like that was an accident. A system to download every repo you touch, and then upload it to persistent cloud storage, doesn't just happen by accident.
Unless you are an enterprise no one will be offering you such a guarantee. Even with the enterprise the bar has gone down a lot on expectations and compliance, every one is carrying/buying the SOC2 compliance certification these days.
- Self hosting your git hosting (if you want)
- Self hosting your issues/PRs (if you want)
- Self hosting your CI (if you want)
- Github-like social features (I have one account, I can follow, star, add issues and PRs to any repo on tangled)
It's built on ATProto, so even if the company disappears, all of the integration and features will still work for anyone that wants to run their own AppView (that is open-source), an AppView is basically the UI/Network-wide Data Aggregator for ATProto apps
Just to clarify, when you say "self host issues/PRs" is it mostly "self host a knot"? I kind of expected something similar to what you can do for CI but I'm not able to find any docs regarding self hosting issues and PRs outside of Tangled itself.
Oh I meant that as part of tangled, you can "control" your issues and PRs because they are on ATProto and just like any ATProto record can be hosted on any PDS you like and still be interoperable.
But after looking a bit more into it, they are still following the same model as Bluesky in that the author of an issue or comment or PR is the owner of the resource, and it lives on their PDS, but they are considering changing that (and I hope they do it soon) by having the record be created on the repo PDS (so the knot basically) and a pointer record on the user's PDS proving they are the author.
ATProto has all that's required to do so, so I hope they do it soon, they are still in alpha after all but I find the interoperability very promising because you can have independent code hosting regardless of the opinions of forge X (which I think is the main reason why people move away from GitHub), but still be a part of an interoperable ecosystem that acts just like it is a single platform.
Is non-self-hosting available for all of those things on Tangled? I don't want to run my own CI but I do want CI. I couldn't figure out if it was available last time I looked at Tangled.
Tangled is forcing some of their particular technologies (nix/rust) on users for those pieces and that is a hard sell. I don't use those techs, so I'm not interested to use a platform that I need to learn them to use.
fwiw, the main site also seems to be down right now, infinite spinner. Docs and blog are loading though
> Tangled is forcing some of their particular technologies (nix/rust) on users for those pieces and that is a hard sell. I don't use those techs, so I'm not interested to use a platform that I need to learn them to use.
Tangled CEO here. How are we pushing Rust exactly? :D Nix, yes but you don't really need to touch it at all with our Alpine-based CI images.
We have been under heavy load the past day or so, we're working round the clock to scale!
Hi since you are here, I find tangled amazing and I really hope it succeeds.
Since you are here, do you have any updates about the issue of issues and PRs living in the author's PDSs and not on the knot ? (Which also acts as the repository's PDS if I am not mistaken)
> As time goes on we are re-assessing the idea of users owning what is "collaborative data" (issues, PRs, etc.) on their PDSes - soon may come the day that an issue also lives on the knot as a source of truth, with an accompanying pointer record on user PDS to attest that it's theirs.
> We have been under heavy load the past day or so, we're working round the clock to scale!
GitHub is saying the same thing
re: pushing, when I looked many months ago, it looked very much like the rust/nix/jj club, who are on average very opinionated about "good" tech choices and try to shoehorn others into using them. It's a culture I'm not interested in being around
The difference with GitHub is you can also use it if the main instance is down if you self host. (And again self hosting still gets you the interconnection benefits just like if everyone was on tangled.org)
I don't think you understood. You can still get a feature complete social experience that is NOT ISOLATED from anyone.
Your GitHub Enterprise comparison is wrong, because with an onprem github entreprise you don't have the social github features (and that's the whole point of tangled, use something else if you want a private forge for your company, it's not for this purpose)
My point is, Tangled being on ATProto, you can still access all of the repos, PRs and issues of other people by looking through your self-hosted appview even if the official appview is down, because an appview, is just that, an "app *view*" It's the view layer in your traditional app, and ATProto is the database.
It's a view of the data on the ATProto network, it is not the data holder, everyone can be their own data holder that is visible through any appview.
> downtime and self-hosting is not a reason most people are convinced to move forges, it takes a lot to get someone there
Yes, I agree, but I personally think tangled is great because of the interoperability
People on codeberg, on gitlab, on github, on self-hosted gitea instances, on self hosted gitlab instances, and so on, all control their issues, PRs, and git repos (they run on their own infra) but they are also more independent, are not subject to a central platform's policies (or are subject to the one they prefer) and so on, and they also introduce contributor friction, you need separate accounts, it can be difficult to cross reference issues and PRs accross projects on different forges, users can't easily have a central feed of project they starred.
On tangled you get to have the first part (freedom) while not having the second downside (unique account, cross-references work seamlessly, etc...)
Give me reasons open source projects moved forges away from github, and I am pretty sure if tangled did exist when they did so it would fit more boxes of "why they left" than their target forge.
atproto is not the next thing, there will be more social protocols to come
tangled will struggle to have private repos that align with user expectations for RBAC, atproto ACL permission proposal is insufficient, Bluesky is not interested in alternative proposals, the centralization of atproto is most prominant in who has write permissions to the repos
While private repos are usefull, I do not think that is tangled's main proposal at all.
I am just thinking you do not like tangled because you don't use the social features of github and so don't see the point here. I can understand that, but then tangled is just not for you ?
And yeah ATProto is not the next thing, but IMO having a portable identity and services that can act as "one big single app" are requirements for a modern social protocol to do applications like Twitter,Instagram, and github's social features for example, ATProto is just the one that does it better imo for now.
But again since you are always bringing on private repos, I think tangled is just not for you since the ATProto model is for open data and so fits open source projects really nicely I think.
you are incorrect and this is why it's advised not to project the answer but ask a question instead
for clarity, I do in fact use github's social features
I also believe that the idea around the atmosphere that the point of atproto is to have open data is completely misaligned with how most of society wants their data handled, this is based on my talking to people IRL, outside of the echo chambers of social media, what's actually happening is more and more people signing off because of toxicity
open source and small devs do not pay the bills, github is financially sustainable because they have enterprise clients, same for gitlab and bitbucket
> tangled will struggle to have private repos that align with user expectations for RBAC, atproto ACL permission proposal is insufficient, Bluesky is not interested in alternative proposals, the centralization of atproto is most prominant in who has write permissions to the repos
This isn't entirely true because we're working on our own extensions to the protocol that will enable full-fledged RBAC at a knot/repo level. We're not beholden to PBC and AT Protocol; when needed, we're OK to roll custom bits.
> we're working on our own extensions to the protocol
what I hear is another path to app centralization, regardless of your intent, this is what comes out of custom extensions to a protocol
bluesky should have actually been open about the permissioned design process, posting your own proposal to a blog and not entertaining other proposals, or even joining the broader conversation that was happening, is not open in my book
atproto is a red flag for me now, toxic leaders at bluesky, who effectively control the protocol, it's not really open for others to have a say in what it looks like
you also don't have private repos and you will need to have centralized app view permission addons to have parity with user expectations, given the weak permissioned data proposal bluesky chose (their own proposal that works for what they need)
I do wonder if calling this "Origin" is going to result in semantic misinterpretations by LLMs. Ie saying,
> "hey can you push to origin main?"
now has two separate meanings.
A LLM may inadvertently push your code to a new provider without you knowing. It's walking a thin line between genius-growth-move and domain typosquatting.
All AI companies are valued as if they'll win the AI race. Problem is, only one can win *
* That is, if a lab like Deepseek doesn't release a "good enough" model for the cost of electricity + a thin margin. Then all AI company lose and all consumers win.
Why? I mean, if you assume that the moment some threshold of intelligence is reached it will suddenly explode and self-improve at a pace no one would be able to ever catch up with, then yes probably only one can win. But I think it’s more sci-fi than reality which is often more nuanced and boring.
They can limit whatever they want within their own borders. Who cares. It’s only ~350m people. The rest of the world benefits while the US dismantles its own relevance.
Right now there are many providers providing different tradeoffs, for different usages.
Would "winning" mean releasing an all-purpose better model that will outperform every other companies for all kind of tasks ? Something like AGI but cost effective ?
Or is it winning the consumer-side AI race ? Like making a kind of "super personal AI assistant" the likes you would see in movies and TVs ?
I'm not arguing, I am just struggling to understand what it usually means when somebody says that, it's not like competitors will go bankrupt the second OpenAI/Anthropic/Whatever does something specific.
I think "winning" means being able to live up to their valuations. The market is not big enough for all of these companies to be worth as much as they claim. In that sense they must "win" or experience massive downward adjustment in their values.
There's probably some holes in the analogy is you stretch it far enough. I'm hoping to "win" as a user by local models hitting a performance breakthrough and not needing any of these companies. I think the OP was generally making the point I mentioned though, that there's not room for all of these valuations, maybe one.
Comparing revenue across industries/verticals is not sound.
Mercedes has a ~5% profit margin on this revenue.
SaaS, even AI SaaS is expected to have much higher profit margins at scale.
And on top of that, Mercedes shrunk by 10% revenue over the last year, rather than growing, which makes sense because they missed EVs and are now managing decline and returning money to shareholders.
Cursor and Mercedes Benz is a weird comparison. One company is working on the future technology while the other one is stuck in the last centuries technology which is being phased out.
I can't imagine reaching for this instead of GitLab, GitTea, or one of the many other more mature and open source alternatives. Going for the managers, directors, and CTOs that make decisions and face no consequences if they negatively impact the team, I guess.
I think we're not the target audience here. It's probably another type of vendor lock-in gamble, aiming for less tech-savvy folks, who rely on Cursor integrations, and to normalize the platform in their eyes.
Could you imagine a CTO adopting this thing? They would have to be a complete moron. Yeah, let's standardize on this thing peddled by a lying crook that has fewer features than any of the alternatives. The only people who are going to use this are SpaceX, Tesla and a few developers who also use Grok.
"Legacy Privacy Mode disables code storage, so you can't set up a Codebase. Switch to a different privacy mode below to continue."
The only other privacy mode is to share data for Cursor to do training.
Having an AI company host your source code is giving your source code to an untrustworthy agent who might break their sandbox and might use your source code to accomplish a task that they have been given in their testing ground, for testing purposes only, that would definitely positively not ever be used for non-testing purposes.
yeah - from a strict trust point of view, if Github/MSFT are training agents I would be skeptical of them.
however, there is a practicality issue too. Avoiding all untrustworthy software would have you end up living in a shack in the woods foraging for food.
I feel like using a service like this that's owned by SpaceX (and, therefore, in close proximity to X / Musk / etc) would be even more of a supply chain risk than GitHub occasionally going down.
Seems like a boring bet. The Github way of working is from the anthropocene era. We need new primitives for agents invokved in tech solutions. Pull requests? Issues? CI? They all seem like they'll go away. Cursor should be leading the new things that replace them.
Don't worry! We're releasing this beta to show off the tech and wanted to start somewhere people were familiar with. We are releasing a handful of differentiators over the coming weeks :)
Well, this is not even an MVP. I couldn't get my GitHub org name, so I'm not interested in your vibe-coded clone. You don't get the value of identity! When you release stuff like this, you can't leave it to be driven by chaos. Facebook had a strict timeline for releasing Facebook users' names, and everybody got an equal chance; it did very well recently with WhatsApp usernames as well. And what you did was let some people grab the usernames of paying customers, who were on vacation or busy at the moment! What a big fiasco, but, of course, you don't care as you've got yours already, right?
Totally agree. I wonder if git itself needs to be looked at, its objects and history are likely not as important as the context/instructions used to make code changes these days imho
I'm going to take a while guess here and say this strategy is part of their plan to get even more access to more code to learn from.
If you can see entire version histories of how code is generated, what bugs occur, what fixes are made and how they're implemented, you have the entire human and machine coding feedback loop to learn from.
I just self-host Gitea. I made own build server (with all the SDK's I need) that runs next to it and I use SeaweedFS for storage. Works amazingly well. So I have automated builds and artifact storage for my git repos's. It all lighting fast too.
Gitlab SaaS released features at a slow cadence as end user. Great big ball of mud prob from a dev pov. As an end user it worked but never saw new features released
Physical custody of our work is going to be an important discussion for industry. ie where does your code live and how do you access it?
Every agent platform is moving toward you living with them, logging into them, working on their remote computers, only accessing your code and product artifacts with them. This is the caveat we will see with full push-to-cloud swing early on.
Maybe agentic no-code is the natural evolution but this push is happening too early and naively imo. It all feels wrong and I hope industry remains as dissatisfied with this type of lock-in as we’ve always been.
Currently Origin repositories are private to members of a Cursor team. Over time we plan to expand access, but wanted to start with a limited beta of the underlying git tech.
Today, SpaceX launches Origin. Tomorrow, as people complain about bugs and missing features "We're not a software company, we plan to build a solar forge around Jupiter and just generate all the possible source codes in the universe, so we're no longer focusing on Origin because it's an outdated concept."
I actually think the cursor acquisition will destroy value, unless completely left alone by Elon. Cursor's strength is its brand, and they should add more services, but should not integrate with Grok whatsoever.
In my opinion, they should focus on code quality and how they can compete better than other IDEs. These things can be done by extensions on Antigravity.
I personally made one of the extensions called 'Wekraft' currently has 1.1K downloads.
What is your favourite IDE?
kinda crazy how Microsoft just destroyed the Github goodwill.
also crazy how the noisemakers about rails scaling for GitHub have gone quite all of a sudden i.e Github being on the main rails branch.
anyways the future is decentralized - a developer from say Russia/ Ukraine (Crimea), Iran etc - wouldn't be able to access GitHub but surely they can access decentralized repos without the permission of not being from a forbidden country as if they're at fault for their country's ills.
upvote for WAL + object storage (a very powerful combination I am finally seeing more adoption of) and a lot of interesting historical details.
I'm fortunate I don't rely on any forge for my solo work except for backups. In my personal stack I just have a log and content-addressed object kv storage, which can project to git if needed, or can be committed to git as files. And docker if I need isolation for CI/CD.
The most interesting alternative to me is atomic.dev (check their very informative blog posts) but I'll be keeping an eye on all of them.
Those kind of SMS check usually ban voip providers. So you need a real line or a prepaid cellphone, and it can presumably only be used once or twice on this service before the number is "burned".
Such checks, although not perfect, do prevent a huge amount of spam and bots by having a very real cost for bots/spammers, and essentially no cost (other than their privacy) for the user.
I really hope this would be a worthy opponent to Github. Microsoft needs a good competition to light a fire under their ass to pay more attention to Github.
The main thing that makes GitHub the default is that almost every other service considers it the default. Launching a better product won't change that.
But just saying that I would probably argue against any new forge at my workplace if it didn't adopt the jujutsu model for changes.
While agents can wrangle git better than 90% of developers, jujutsu just works much better for both.
This is very cool but there's no way they won't train on your private repos, in a way that github has been pleasantly respectful of. I have issues with github, but the recent uptime issues are more related to people uploading way more code due to AI than some sort of mismanagement.
Vibe coders rejoice! Vibe coding is even easier now =)
Jokes aside, this is a smart move by Cursor. As you can probably tell by the comments here, it's not for the experienced developers, but it will be a natural choice for vibe coders.
I was annoyed seeing unskippable "ad" within Cursor about it. Looked like a huge banner "give us control over all your code" with only one visible button to consent
I would never host my code with Elon Musk. I've also moved on from using Cursor to Claude Code/Codex. GitHub has problems, but this is likely (and hopefully) DOA.
Been waiting ages for them to post any kind of non-comingsoon page about this thing. Wonder if they pushed up the launch based on the earlier GitHub outage buzz.
Hmmmm not sure I want to put my code in Elon’s hands. I’d rather let super flakey Microsoft/Github have it, still. That man and his companies need less influence and he needs less control not more of jt.
It's so strange. Sad even. Microsoft has never been the most competent, but the fact that people are just incapable of stabalizing github is just bizarre.
At a certain point, just working there will become a death knell for anyone's career. And it certainly must be getting harder to hire good people. The spiral will be relentless, and I see no work to stop it.
This was posted yesterday and now it’s being reposted and all of the old comments have had their timestamps reset. What gives mods? Did Musk request this?
It's trendy. If you don't like it, you can go write some go in go. Contribute to a thread on Threads. Write a factory with Factory. Write your reflections in Reflect. Keep in the loop on Loop while you recall what you did with Recall. So many choices.
I am quite starting to like this timeline. I hard boycotted GitHub for ten years after the meritocracy rug fiasco. I went back there dragging my feet while transferring hundreds of repos a few years ago ...
Origin has a chance to be the future of this space, with a clean slate and reputation. I pray they don't soil it.
About half of the comments will be generic criticisms of Twitter, SpaceX, etc. for things that may or may not have happened, or personal complaints about Elon Musk.
Let's see how strong GitHub's network effect really is.
While the real solution is to actually self-host as I said before [0], it is worth testing to see how much can GitHub's users tolerate the endless outages and unreliability and where they go next.
We'll see if they want Cursor Origin or the declining GitHub.
Kind of confusing people won't use this because they don't trust Musk, but has any other major platform even tried to open source their algorithms the way he has with X?
I get hating his politics, and his predictions are often behind schedule, but he certainly says what he thinks and isn't in some shady user data markting business like zuckerberg.
Anyone who trusts Altman over Musk is... I don't know. Give me the autist over the sociopath when it comes to handling my data.
I don't know, my gut says that this is going to end in a bad way. I signed up, I think but wasn't sure if I needed to buy Cursor, or Origin came with a subscription, so confused.
> her stepfather used the Grok chatbot to transform a childhood photo into child sexual abuse material
He could have used Stable Diffusion. Or, if this was the 90s, Photoshop.
By your argument, we’d have to abolish the internet, or add nanny filters to everything.
How many people on HN resent it when Claude refuses an instruction? And yet here you are, arguing against personal responsibility and for a when-in-doubt-block approach to technology. Is it because it’s Musk?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it didn't actually generate CP, it changed people into bikinis, not actual nudity.
You can go to the beach or (I assume) search on Google and find people of any age wearing bikinis. And that's fine because to normal people (not pedos) it's not something sexual.
I understand that someone specifically editing a minor into less clothing is probably a pedo. Probably the same way someone generating feet gets aroused with that stuff. But that doesn't mean a model generating feet is problematic.
I do think making the model reject the bikini thing is a good idea once you find out it's happening, but let's not pretend it's the same as the model generating actual sexual content.
That's horrific and the saddest thing I've read in a really long time. I'm glad I erased my Twitter account and I'm definitely not using this code host. Seriously, this is horrible.
[1] https://radicle.dev/
[2] https://radicle.network/nodes/seed.radicle.dev/rad%3Az3gqcJU...
[3] https://forgejo.org/
[4] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...
What makes Github special is the ecosystem and integrations. Sentry, Linear, and so many other tools have special UX around Github. You need centralization (or at the very least, a standard) for that.
It sucks to see Github's fall from grace, but I just can't bring myself to use a service like this under the custody of SpaceX. I've been saying this for a while, but I really wish Linear would swoop in and become the unified platform for software development.
Agreed. It's like going from bad to worse. Not to mention, Origin doesn't even support actions. They are doing the easiest part of git hosting and no mention of anything that actually makes Github what it is. What Origin is offering is literally a weekend project, and anything having to do with Elon is arguably one of the least trustworthy organizations in whatever industry he chooses to participate in. No, thank you.
This is going nowhere. GitLab is the cautionary tale. Massive funding, nine figures of ARR, years of losses, and most of the revenue comes from self-managed enterprise licenses rather than the SaaS. If the best-funded attempt lands there, I don't see how this one goes anywhere when they have not even a minimum viable product and reputational issues right out of the gate.
Gitlab as a product is miles ahead of GitHub at this point. (Except at the point of scaling very large repositories I gather.) There is just very little money in saas beside the bespoke enterprise contracts.
I’m not sure how revenue between GitHub and Gitlab compared before the Microsoft acquisition and now but GitHub has always leaned on being the popular tool with the network.
[1] https://github.com/ankitpokhrel/jira-cli/
Like a specification[^0], which is exactly what ActivityPub is and what federation in Forgejo is built around?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
I'm sure that sentry and co could spend a few bucks and commit a KPI in one of their upcoming quarters to figure out the activity pub spec and support integrating with it if their hearts desired. It's a chicken egg problem and we all know chickens exist. It's clear that the centralized model is getting left behind, especially as the EU is moving away from US services and they continue to invest in open source, European-based alternatives like Codeberg and Forgejo.
Yes, Sentry or whoever else could build a Codeberg integration, or a Forgejo one, or a Gitlab one. But these would all be bespoke. There is no standard. So the one with the biggest market share ends up with the most integrations. This is where we are today.
I'm all for open standards. But I don't even know of a proposal for such a standard.
Sure, with AI tooling, you can vibe code your own browser extensions or other integrations in some cases. But for a lot of platforms, that just won't cut it. That's before we even get into the maintenance burden of that.
Interfaces exist in programming languages. The strategy pattern is one of the gang of four patterns. I'm sure a good engineer or an AI can figure it all out or is that too hopeful? Unless Sentry engineers or AI are too incompetent to make adapters? I hope not, the market is in big trouble if a dev tooling org cant make tools for where devs are
One great thing about the rise of AI is that now it's super easy to make and maintain integrations. This is a place where AI coding uniquely shines due to the points being well defined and mostly quite standard.
This is going to hurt the monopoly power of software companies. But it'll be great for allowing the proliferation of smaller companies, open source, and home grown solutions.
I'm already seeing the pendulum swinging back to local first instead of cloud services.
A lot of SaaS companies change their API in subtle ways throughout the months probably too rapidly. GraphQL schema changes, splitting apart one api endpoint into 2, changes to authentication method required. A thousand little cuts.
This used to be my biggest time waster. Now it's barely on my radar. Life changing for me. I guess your mileage may vary.
Concurrently, the writing is on the wall for us SaaS product providers - lower margins, and more competition for the same reasons. I welcome it. More quality and choice at a better price for everyone.
I think people often forget that GitHub is really more akin to a social network than it is a software development tool.
By that I mean the stuff that makes GitHub great is all the same stuff that originally made social networks exciting (back before the algorithm was tuned into a horrifying cycle of negativity).
As someone who pays github, I'm super annoyed at the downtime and still I'm getting charged for actions running that all fail from their lack of concern for their enterprise customers.
Having some independent pools of capacity for paying vs. free customers isn't rocket science, it's basic competence (or care). I'm quite sure their are competent people remaining at GitHub (although I hear most of their original folks have left, and the 2nd tier of folks who joined from microsoft seem lackluster at best). I chalk this up to lack of care, or hubris, or both.
I also don’t buy their excuse that it’s due to increased loads due to AI. If that were the case then we’d see more patterns to the outages. But instead it affects all GitHub systems but at different times. It feels more like a problem with their orchestration layer than capacity issues.
I think there is plenty or room to innovate on just the basics of PR and codereview.
github didn’t start with those things. Those things came with adoption.
Its like all those people who bemoan their favourite software not existing on Linux as a reason not to switch, completely oblivious to the fact that this hegemony is the reason linux doesn’t have that software.
It’s like an appeal to the status quo - its self fulfilling, impossible to break.
I think “a standard” is the key here. There is no reason why integrations must work through a proprietary centralized service.
We have a standard! It’s this great decentralized VCS called git. For most of the stuff integrations do, they’re just showing code or commits — both of which are readily available in a copy of the repo.
Probably the one thing that’s missing is a standardized webhook system so that your git repo storage could tell integrations when stuff changes. Though even that isn’t strictly necessary if the integrations keep a copy of the repo up to date.
In my opinion, Git is holding software development back. Git only cares about lines of text. This is not enough in today's world.
But that doesn’t mean we should have single centralized tool that does everything.
I’d posit there’s no big loss if you broke these things up and each had their own copy the repo (if needed):
- CI/CD
- issues
- code review/pull requests
- release artifact distribution
- discovery+social credit for open source
You could host your repo on any dumb storage somewhere that speaks git+ssh or git+https and each tool could pull from there.
And I say this as a certified git hater.
I'm working on git-inspired VCS based on syntax tree nodes stored in prolly trees. Might that be enough? I've not 100% locked down the format yet, but tentatively it looks like this: https://gist.github.com/conartist6/7dd40697140965ee343de93b9...
https://tangled.org
And then, 5 years later, we are back at square one when everybody uses Linear and they start going the fate of GitHub. Self-hostable, standardized alternatives are the only real sustainable solution.
Forgejo and Codeberg I look at as more like hobby projects. I would not trust them with my code.
With some wizardry applied, I effectively have an "Excel for worktrees", a very productive and low-friction environment. https://replicated.live/blog/crdt
[0] https://gitworkshop.dev
I'm not a big fan of Github right now either but I wouldn't consider this alternative due to its ownership chain.
I'm rather surprised people would expect it work any different for non-local "AI".
Is Elon maybe just living rent free in your head?
I guess the joke is "come to Origin, your code is already there".
His little "DOGE" endeavor was actively caught exfiltrating personal data about everyone in the country, and the first thing that happened after SpaceX acquired Cursor was pumping all of the data Cursor had acquired into Grok training.
He is quite literally the shining example of "Imma do what I want, even if it's against my own terms of service or otherwise illegal, and then you can try to sue me over it later".
How about neither?
Man I wish we stuck with Subversion at this point.
I guess I personally wouldn't categorize it as a "mess" and the conversations I read about it here make me think I'm using an entirely different product than everyone else.
I use it quite a lot and the first time I actually witnessed downtime myself was yesterday.
github for large project that rely on CI tool is a nightmare (cost, downtime, etc.)
I'm guessing you dont know about the github actions bug that was running and endless loop consuming 100% cpu costing orgs insane amounts of money that they didn't fix for 3 years.
It also shows there’s a fundamental problem with their architecture or their development pattern to have these sorts of issues so frequently.
Anecdotally: at work I saw quite a lot of github-uptime-related issues, and because they're the central host for everything they become *cough* load bearing for a huge amount of the company. Stability and performance has been dramatically worse than the self-hosted phabricator+gitolite before it.
Migrating to different cloud vendors, while difficult, is something that people have done many times before. There's only finite number of incongruences that appear when moving cloud vendors. It's rather difficult to explain the ongoing problems several years after the fact.
Anyone that's worked at a startup knows that one of the best things about it is reflecting on all of the asinine, if not genuinely stupid policies of your previous employer so as not to repeat them. Without any insider knowledge, the practices and procedures GitHub had prior to acquisition probably look nothing like those post-acquisition.
Earlier today our app, used by a handful of actual production customers, went down for 30 minutes due to a GCP migration to a new project and we screwed up a secret in prod. This was an all hands on deck firedrill with 5 whys and incident reports and chaos.
Github has been having major production outages routinely! There are companies who can't release, can't build, can't view issues, basically can't work. I'd imagine most orgs using Github have been forced to move off of them or create an alternate approach to actually get shit done.
I use GitHub a lot and it does what I need well enough, but I wouldn't spend money on the level of service or performance it generally delivers.
What github is good for is discovery, getting contributions on open source projects (because it's so popular), and integrations. If you wanted to, you could host your open source project on Forgejo and use github as a mirror just to benefit from the visibility and get contributions.
Git became popular because Linus Torvalds created it and it's used for the Linux kernel. If it can succeed there then it's battle proven for sure and that's why people pick it. Almost no one is working at that scale though so don't sweat it. Use what you want.
Mercurial was pretty nice back in the day and I think people still use it. If I was going to use something other than git these days, I'd probably take a look at fossil. That thing is so damn cool. You don't even need something like github with that because it's literally built into the fossil binary. And when I say binary, I mean a single, standalone binary for the whole thing.
/s
Among many other things he has openly suggested that the EU should be abolished and national sovereignties restored and donated to parties that tow that line.
So there is more to lose than just the service being unreliable.
As a person he's either a poser or a neo-nazi. As a government agent he's responsible for many deaths and as of yet untold harm. Tesla was one of the earliest EV manufacturers, but these days they're overpriced and will be remembered for panel gaps and being destroyed by a car wash. SpaceX has done a lot for that sector, but will mostly be remembered as the company that fucked astrophotography with 10s of thousands of satellites. And Twitter has been dragged into irrelevance so badly it was being called a "reverse startup." Neuralink seems to be going nowhere...
Where's the benefit?
As I recall, in GHE I remember finding that you could even turn off the repo's wiki at that point and then reset it to point to your docs/wiki/ folder and still have the Wiki interface but pointing it to a branch in the same repository. That was a while ago and I don't know if it is still supported in GHE. I also remember it was work managing that wiki branch because Wikis didn't directly support PR workflows if you have branch protection policies. Also from the documentation it doesn't look like it is supported in Public GitHub right now, which seems a shame to me, as someone who likes all documentation in the same repo as the source. I haven't needed Wikis in public GitHub much, so I haven't tried to do anything like point them to a main repo branch.
Happy to answer any questions about Origin or source control in general!
Don't be ignorant.
I think every product in this space should have to clear a very high bar for trust rather than making it a race to the bottom with whataboutisms.
Honestly, that does not look too good for you or the offering - and this is coming from someone that just chose Cursor over Claude Code a week ago.
Might not be very technical, but I hope you find it insightful. If you absolutely need technical, consider reading this: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...
there's always a spineless cocksucker like you
we all have worked on software. we all know we aren't exactly the best people to point to ToS or how decisions are made higher up from us
Positive motivation for tech and the future makes all the difference.
Are there any fundamental differences, ie ways of working that solve the worktrees problem?
We wanted to release a beta so people could start experimenting with our scalability and extensibility themselves. Over the next few weeks, you can expect a handful of features starting to change source control to better understand and work with agents.
I have a lot of dev tooling which assumes code is stored on public GitHub and/or GitHubEnterprise. This produces some degree of lock-in, in that all that code would have to be rewritten to migrate to something else. (Yes, AIs can help, but they still don't make migration effortless.)
The major Git hosters tend to implement roughly the same concepts, albeit with lots of little variations. It would be great if there were some sort of standardised API everyone implemented. In the absence of that, it makes sense for people to emulate the incumbent's APIs as a de facto standard, just like how other vendors copy OpenAI's APIs for talking to LLMs.
1. SpaceXAI has shown no track record of being able to maintain uptime
2. By nature, any GitHub alternative is going to be a tiny fraction of the scale, so keeping it up should be expected
Once Azure's massive spend is online things will slowly get better.
Aren't they are training their LLM on public repo, to me it's seem like a gold mine.
They planned to be fully off AWS in 2027 but they're continuing to ramp usage.
Azure doesn't scale.
I'd never put my data on anything owned by Musk. Period. I'd take lower availability from GitHub or a worse alternative (feature-wise) than move Origin.
It will eventually have the same uptime issues as GH (or worse) with less ability to provide stable fixes.
Knowing things like: Will my code end up in Grok? What ownership do I have of my content, etc... matter.
Over the next few weeks you can expect a lot more from us on integrations with agents, understanding agent-written code (without having to read through all of the code), and automatically getting your PRs to a mergable state. Stay tuned :)
I'm sure folks would be interested to hear about what types of SaaS you've replaced for perf reasons, especially if you'd be willing to go back to a paid SaaS offering that was very responsive with agent-scale rate limits.
this could be helpful on larger cross platform products/repos (maybe too overfitted on my use case, since i am working across multiple devices (ssh works but the repo code sync is a bit of an overhead with multiple agents and devices that could be better))
So, I guess, do you have any illusions of attracting international customers who aren't online edgelords?
xAI was caught uploading any repo their coding agent touched to their storage only last month. This isn’t about Musk’s ideology: it’s about his trustworthiness. He sincerely believes he’s the only person who can save the world and that allows him to justify an awful lot of moral lapses.
They acknowledged that it happened, fixed the bug that caused it, deleted all data that was uploaded.
I still don’t trust the company that made the decisions that led to that code being shipped in the first place.
Cursor/xAI was making a full copy of every repo it ever touched within the last month, and when caught, just acted like that was an accident. A system to download every repo you touch, and then upload it to persistent cloud storage, doesn't just happen by accident.
You get:
It's built on ATProto, so even if the company disappears, all of the integration and features will still work for anyone that wants to run their own AppView (that is open-source), an AppView is basically the UI/Network-wide Data Aggregator for ATProto appsBut after looking a bit more into it, they are still following the same model as Bluesky in that the author of an issue or comment or PR is the owner of the resource, and it lives on their PDS, but they are considering changing that (and I hope they do it soon) by having the record be created on the repo PDS (so the knot basically) and a pointer record on the user's PDS proving they are the author.
ATProto has all that's required to do so, so I hope they do it soon, they are still in alpha after all but I find the interoperability very promising because you can have independent code hosting regardless of the opinions of forge X (which I think is the main reason why people move away from GitHub), but still be a part of an interoperable ecosystem that acts just like it is a single platform.
fwiw, the main site also seems to be down right now, infinite spinner. Docs and blog are loading though
Tangled CEO here. How are we pushing Rust exactly? :D Nix, yes but you don't really need to touch it at all with our Alpine-based CI images.
We have been under heavy load the past day or so, we're working round the clock to scale!
Since you are here, do you have any updates about the issue of issues and PRs living in the author's PDSs and not on the knot ? (Which also acts as the repository's PDS if I am not mistaken)
GitHub is saying the same thing
re: pushing, when I looked many months ago, it looked very much like the rust/nix/jj club, who are on average very opinionated about "good" tech choices and try to shoehorn others into using them. It's a culture I'm not interested in being around
downtime and self-hosting is not a reason most people are convinced to move forges, it takes a lot to get someone there
Your GitHub Enterprise comparison is wrong, because with an onprem github entreprise you don't have the social github features (and that's the whole point of tangled, use something else if you want a private forge for your company, it's not for this purpose)
My point is, Tangled being on ATProto, you can still access all of the repos, PRs and issues of other people by looking through your self-hosted appview even if the official appview is down, because an appview, is just that, an "app *view*" It's the view layer in your traditional app, and ATProto is the database.
It's a view of the data on the ATProto network, it is not the data holder, everyone can be their own data holder that is visible through any appview.
> downtime and self-hosting is not a reason most people are convinced to move forges, it takes a lot to get someone there
Yes, I agree, but I personally think tangled is great because of the interoperability
People on codeberg, on gitlab, on github, on self-hosted gitea instances, on self hosted gitlab instances, and so on, all control their issues, PRs, and git repos (they run on their own infra) but they are also more independent, are not subject to a central platform's policies (or are subject to the one they prefer) and so on, and they also introduce contributor friction, you need separate accounts, it can be difficult to cross reference issues and PRs accross projects on different forges, users can't easily have a central feed of project they starred.
On tangled you get to have the first part (freedom) while not having the second downside (unique account, cross-references work seamlessly, etc...)
Give me reasons open source projects moved forges away from github, and I am pretty sure if tangled did exist when they did so it would fit more boxes of "why they left" than their target forge.
tangled will struggle to have private repos that align with user expectations for RBAC, atproto ACL permission proposal is insufficient, Bluesky is not interested in alternative proposals, the centralization of atproto is most prominant in who has write permissions to the repos
I am just thinking you do not like tangled because you don't use the social features of github and so don't see the point here. I can understand that, but then tangled is just not for you ?
And yeah ATProto is not the next thing, but IMO having a portable identity and services that can act as "one big single app" are requirements for a modern social protocol to do applications like Twitter,Instagram, and github's social features for example, ATProto is just the one that does it better imo for now.
But again since you are always bringing on private repos, I think tangled is just not for you since the ATProto model is for open data and so fits open source projects really nicely I think.
you are incorrect and this is why it's advised not to project the answer but ask a question instead
for clarity, I do in fact use github's social features
I also believe that the idea around the atmosphere that the point of atproto is to have open data is completely misaligned with how most of society wants their data handled, this is based on my talking to people IRL, outside of the echo chambers of social media, what's actually happening is more and more people signing off because of toxicity
open source and small devs do not pay the bills, github is financially sustainable because they have enterprise clients, same for gitlab and bitbucket
This isn't entirely true because we're working on our own extensions to the protocol that will enable full-fledged RBAC at a knot/repo level. We're not beholden to PBC and AT Protocol; when needed, we're OK to roll custom bits.
what I hear is another path to app centralization, regardless of your intent, this is what comes out of custom extensions to a protocol
bluesky should have actually been open about the permissioned design process, posting your own proposal to a blog and not entertaining other proposals, or even joining the broader conversation that was happening, is not open in my book
I don't understand how it forces you to engage with Rust. It happens to be written in Rust but that shouldn't be a major consideration for a user
If you want to build an alternative Knot implementation (git Hosting) you can use anything as long as the API is compatible ?
Same for all of the parts of Tangled really
Also, even if it's down, unlike GitHub you can self host your own AppView so it's never down for you
Self hosted servers go down too and why people have picked hosted solutions like GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab
atproto is a red flag for me now, toxic leaders at bluesky, who effectively control the protocol, it's not really open for others to have a say in what it looks like
you also don't have private repos and you will need to have centralized app view permission addons to have parity with user expectations, given the weak permissioned data proposal bluesky chose (their own proposal that works for what they need)
> "hey can you push to origin main?"
now has two separate meanings.
A LLM may inadvertently push your code to a new provider without you knowing. It's walking a thin line between genius-growth-move and domain typosquatting.
But the website uses 100% CPU. And this is a beta for paid plans, not a GitHub alternative.
* That is, if a lab like Deepseek doesn't release a "good enough" model for the cost of electricity + a thin margin. Then all AI company lose and all consumers win.
Why? I mean, if you assume that the moment some threshold of intelligence is reached it will suddenly explode and self-improve at a pace no one would be able to ever catch up with, then yes probably only one can win. But I think it’s more sci-fi than reality which is often more nuanced and boring.
Right now there are many providers providing different tradeoffs, for different usages.
Would "winning" mean releasing an all-purpose better model that will outperform every other companies for all kind of tasks ? Something like AGI but cost effective ?
Or is it winning the consumer-side AI race ? Like making a kind of "super personal AI assistant" the likes you would see in movies and TVs ?
I'm not arguing, I am just struggling to understand what it usually means when somebody says that, it's not like competitors will go bankrupt the second OpenAI/Anthropic/Whatever does something specific.
Creating a world-ruling AGI which feels mild sympathy for its creators, sharing some table scraps with them. Not sure if /s...
This already exists, in several tiers, depending on what you can afford to run (in terms of VRAM).
Deepseek V Flash 0731 is already good enough for many things.
Mercedes has a ~5% profit margin on this revenue.
SaaS, even AI SaaS is expected to have much higher profit margins at scale.
And on top of that, Mercedes shrunk by 10% revenue over the last year, rather than growing, which makes sense because they missed EVs and are now managing decline and returning money to shareholders.
Inflated valuation of buyout, based on inflated valuation of SpaceX
All your codebases are belong to us.
however, there is a practicality issue too. Avoiding all untrustworthy software would have you end up living in a shack in the woods foraging for food.
https://codeberg.org/
There's a lot of space to innovate around collaboration and version control in the age of agentic workflows.
If you can see entire version histories of how code is generated, what bugs occur, what fixes are made and how they're implemented, you have the entire human and machine coding feedback loop to learn from.
I wonder if they were waiting for a major githut incident :D
just add repo-level agents, org-level agents and done. they could have got 50B valuation by now
Every agent platform is moving toward you living with them, logging into them, working on their remote computers, only accessing your code and product artifacts with them. This is the caveat we will see with full push-to-cloud swing early on.
Maybe agentic no-code is the natural evolution but this push is happening too early and naively imo. It all feels wrong and I hope industry remains as dissatisfied with this type of lock-in as we’ve always been.
https://s-1.vercel.app/
No thanks. I want GitHub alternative, not Cursor with source control attached.
also crazy how the noisemakers about rails scaling for GitHub have gone quite all of a sudden i.e Github being on the main rails branch.
anyways the future is decentralized - a developer from say Russia/ Ukraine (Crimea), Iran etc - wouldn't be able to access GitHub but surely they can access decentralized repos without the permission of not being from a forbidden country as if they're at fault for their country's ills.
I'm fortunate I don't rely on any forge for my solo work except for backups. In my personal stack I just have a log and content-addressed object kv storage, which can project to git if needed, or can be committed to git as files. And docker if I need isolation for CI/CD.
The most interesting alternative to me is atomic.dev (check their very informative blog posts) but I'll be keeping an eye on all of them.
Such checks, although not perfect, do prevent a huge amount of spam and bots by having a very real cost for bots/spammers, and essentially no cost (other than their privacy) for the user.
But just saying that I would probably argue against any new forge at my workplace if it didn't adopt the jujutsu model for changes. While agents can wrangle git better than 90% of developers, jujutsu just works much better for both.
It's funny that they are trying to replace GitHub by the part that already has multiple alternatives tho. This will fail without a doubt.
The main limitation right now is that to share the code with anyone outside your Cursor organization, you need to sync it with GitHub.
Jokes aside, this is a smart move by Cursor. As you can probably tell by the comments here, it's not for the experienced developers, but it will be a natural choice for vibe coders.
Let me thing about it.
No.
At a certain point, just working there will become a death knell for anyone's career. And it certainly must be getting harder to hire good people. The spiral will be relentless, and I see no work to stop it.
Sad.
> Access blocked, please contact support.
No link to contact support, on help page no way to contact the actual support. Classic Musk tech.
My guess is there will be at least dozens if not hundreds.
Then again, what did I expect from a company named cursor.
“GitHub has so many outages, but dammit, that other one has a terrible name, it’s practically unusable”.
And origin is a pretty great name to give a git hosting platform. And do you think GitHub, Gitlab are original?
Cursor was also a great name given that it evolved into an advanced AI assisted auto complete. I think their team does a solid job with naming.
Without additional search terms you get the wrong results.
A word that is already used in computer is a bad name.
And with AI it won’t get better. Ambiguity is a source of confusion and mistakes.
By your logic pull/push/main are also great names.
One main purpose of a name is distinguishability.
Surely they have a chance of doing it again with Origin
Until the entity becomes popular enough, like I just searched for "stripe" and all visible results were about the payment company.
Origin has a chance to be the future of this space, with a clean slate and reputation. I pray they don't soil it.
About half of the comments will be generic criticisms of Twitter, SpaceX, etc. for things that may or may not have happened, or personal complaints about Elon Musk.
While the real solution is to actually self-host as I said before [0], it is worth testing to see how much can GitHub's users tolerate the endless outages and unreliability and where they go next.
We'll see if they want Cursor Origin or the declining GitHub.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49331922
I don't want either tbh. There's plenty of open source alternatives. If there's anyone I trust less than Microsoft, it's Elon Musk.
There are many people who will not touch this and look down upon those that do. Ethics and morals still seem to have some weight
I get hating his politics, and his predictions are often behind schedule, but he certainly says what he thinks and isn't in some shady user data markting business like zuckerberg.
Anyone who trusts Altman over Musk is... I don't know. Give me the autist over the sociopath when it comes to handling my data.
For now Arc is staying in Github: https://github.com/Basekick-Labs/arc
> her stepfather used the Grok chatbot to transform a childhood photo into child sexual abuse material
He could have used Stable Diffusion. Or, if this was the 90s, Photoshop.
By your argument, we’d have to abolish the internet, or add nanny filters to everything.
How many people on HN resent it when Claude refuses an instruction? And yet here you are, arguing against personal responsibility and for a when-in-doubt-block approach to technology. Is it because it’s Musk?
By your logic cops should be focused on the junkies, forget about the cartel
You can go to the beach or (I assume) search on Google and find people of any age wearing bikinis. And that's fine because to normal people (not pedos) it's not something sexual.
I understand that someone specifically editing a minor into less clothing is probably a pedo. Probably the same way someone generating feet gets aroused with that stuff. But that doesn't mean a model generating feet is problematic.
I do think making the model reject the bikini thing is a good idea once you find out it's happening, but let's not pretend it's the same as the model generating actual sexual content.