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Goodbye GitHub: Zig developer ditches “sinking ship” over Microsoft’s AI
The Zig Software Foundation has pulled Zig from GitHub saying Microsoft’s ownership of the coding platform has led to inexcusable bugs caused by “vibe scheduling” and other AI-exacerbated problems.
The open-source Zig programming language has been hosted on GitHub for a decade. But in a post listing a litany of concerns, Andrew Kelly, President of the Zig Software Foundation, announced that Zig was moving to Codeberg.
Kelly expected the migration to happen eventually, saying that when GitHub was bought by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2018, he thought to himself: “Please just give me five years before everything goes to shit.” Instead, he got seven years, so that’s a win at least.
TechFinitive asked Microsoft for comment but has yet to hear back at the time of publishing.
Vibe scheduling causing delays
What’s the problem? “Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE, it’s abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it,” Kelly wrote.
“Priorities and the engineering culture have rotted, leaving users inflicted with some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework in the name of progress. Stuff that used to be snappy is now sluggish and often entirely broken.”
Kelly particularly criticised GitHub Actions, a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform for automating a build, test and deployment pipeline. Saying Actions is full of “inexcusable bugs”, Kelly blames the shift to AI.
“After the CEO of GitHub said to ‘embrace AI or get out’, it seems the lackeys at Microsoft took the hint, because GitHub Actions started ‘vibe-scheduling’; choosing jobs to run seemingly at random,” Kelly said.
The bugs and an inability to step in manually means that Zig’s CI system is backed up, says Kelly.
Beyond the bugs, Kelly said he hoped that shifting away from GitHub would lead to “fewer violations… of our strict no LLM/no AI policy, which I believe are at least in part due to GitHub aggressively pushing the ‘file an issue with Copilot’ feature in everyone’s face”.
Time to step away from GitHub
Rather than wasting time or donations to the foundation addressing this “crumbling infrastructure”, the software foundation has switched to Berlin-based Codeberg.
As Matthew Lugg, a member of the Zig core team, noted in August via a GitHub thread discussing a long-running bug: “we’ve decided to just migrate away… since it’s become clear that GitHub is a rapidly sinking ship”.
Or as one Reddit poster noted in a thread on the subject: “GitHub’s CEO said ‘developers: embrace AI or get out’. So they did.”
A few days after the Zig post, the Dillo browser project said it too would be moving away from GitHub, for a long list of reasons, but also pointing to “the current trend of overfocusing on LLMs and generative AI”.
AI or the highway
The very public denouncement of GitHub follows a recent shakeup in leadership at the coding platform, with CEO Thomas Dohmke stepping down in August.
Instead of a replacement, Microsoft decided GitHub would no longer have a CEO and would instead report into Microsoft’s new CoreAI engineering division.
That sparked a warning from analysts that tying GitHub too closely to Microsoft and Azure may “alienate” developers, but it would seem GitHub has found its own way – vibe scheduling and inexcusable bugs, as per Kelly – to anger at least some of its users.
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