Ditching GitHub
AI. AI AI AI. Artificial "Intelligence". Large Language Models. Well, they sure are large, I'll give them that. This isn't quite how I was hoping to write a new blog post after years of not touching the site, but I guess it's what we're going with. To make it very clear: none of the text, code, images or any other output I produce is AI-written or AI-assisted. I also refuse to acknowledge that AI is even a thing by adding a disclaimer to all my posts saying that I do not use it. But this post is titled "Ditching GitHub", so let's address that first. Millions of developers and businesses call GitHub home And that's probably not a good thing. I myself am guilty of often searching "<project> github" in DuckDuckGo many a time when I want to find open-source projects. I'll probably keep doing it, too, because that's what search engines understand. So, GitHub. According to their API, I joined the first day of 2014 after noon (seriously, did I not have anything better to do on new year's? And how is that over twelve years ago already‽). Back then, I was fairly into C# programming on Windows. It seems I felt fairly comfortable with my code already, and was willing to let other people see and use it. That was after I had been dabbling with Visual Basic Scripts, which in turn was after console batch scripting. I also tried Visual Basics before C#, but as a programming noob, with few-to-none programming terms learnt, I found the whole and quite strange ↪1 . Regardless of the language, telling the computer to do things and have it obey you was pretty cool! Even more so if those things had a visual interface. So let's show others what cool things we could pull off! During that same year, I also started using Telegram. Such a refreshing application this used to be. Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you could automate Telegram itself ? Let's search to see if other people have made something to use that from C#. Turns out TLSharp did in fact exist! The repository seems to be archived now, in favor of WTelegramClient . I tried to contribute to it. I remember being excited to have a working code generator that could be used to automatically update the types and functions that the library had to offer, based on the most recent definitions provided by Telegram (at least indirectly, via their own open-source repositories.) Unfortunately, I had some friction with the maintainer back then. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding, or I was too young, naive, or just couldn't get my point across. That didn't discourage me though ↪2 . Instead, I took it upon myself to reimplement the library. Back then, Telegram's lack of documentation on the protocol made it quite the headache (literally, and not just once) to get it working. Despite that, I persevered, and was able to slowly make progress. Fast-forward a bit ↪3 , still young and with plenty of time on my hands, one day I decided I wanted to try this whole Linux thing. But C# felt like it was mostly a Windows thing. Let's see, what other languages are there that are commonplace in Linux… " Python " huh? Looks pretty neat, let's give it a shot! Being the imaginative person I am, I obviously decided to call my new project a mix between Tele gram and Python . Thus, Telethon was born ↪4 . Ah, GitHub stars. Quite the meaningless metric, considering they can be bought, and yet… there's something about them. I can't help myself. I like internet points. They make me feel like there are other people out there who, just like me, have a love for the craft, and share it with this small gesture. I never intended for Telethon to become as popular as it has. I attribute its success to a mix of luck, creating it at the right time, choice of popular programming language, and lack of many other options back then. And of course, the ridiculous amount of time, care and patience I have put (and continue to put) into the project out of my own volition. Downloads are not a metric I've cared to look at much. But then came support questions. A steady growth of stars. Bug reports. Feature requests. Pull requests. Small donations! And heart-felt thank-you emails or messages. Each showing that people like it enough to spend their time on it, and some even like it enough that they want to see it become better, or take the time to show their appreciation. This… this feels nice, actually. Sure, it's not perfect. There will always be an idiot who thinks you owe them even more time ↪5 . Because the gift of open-source you've given the world is not enough. But that's okay. I've had a bit of an arc in how I've dealt with issues, from excited, to tired and quite frankly pretty rude at times (sorry! Perhaps it was burn-out?), to now where I try to first and foremost remain polite, even if my responses can feel cold or blunt. There are real human beings behind the screens. Let's not forget that. Telethon is closing-in on twelve thousand stars on GitHub ↪6 . I don't know how many are bots, or how many still use GitHub at all, but that's a really darn impressive number. cpython itself is at seventy-two thousand! We're talking the same order of magnitude here. So I am well aware that such a project makes for quite the impressive portfolio. There's no denying that. We don't have infinite time to carefully audit all dependencies we rely on, as much as we should. So clearly, bigger star number must mean better project, or something like that. To an extent, it does, even if subconsciously. Unfortunately for me, that means I can't quite fully ditch GitHub. Not only would I be contributing to link-rot, but the vast majority of projects are still hosted there. So whether I like it or not, I'm going to have to keep my account if I want to retain my access to help out other projects. And, yes. Losing that amount of stars would suck. But wow has the platform gotten worse. Barely a screen into GitHub's landing page while not logged in, there it is. The first mention of AI. Scroll a bit further, and… Your AI partner everywhere. They're not wrong. It is everywhere. AI continues to be shoved so hard in so many places . Every time I'm reading a blog post and there's even the slightest mention of AI, or someone points it out in the comments, my heart sinks a little. "Aw, I was really enjoying reading this. Too bad." ↪7 It doesn't help that I'm quite bad at picking up the tell-tale signs of AI-written text ↪8 . So it hurts even more when I find out. AI used to be a fun topic. Learning how to make self-improving genetic algorithms, or basic neural networks to recognize digits . For pity's sake, even I have written about AI before . I used to be fascinated by @carykh's YouTube videos about their Evolution Simulator . It was so cool ! And now I feel so disgusted by the current situation. Remember when I said I was proud of having a working code generator for TLSharp? Shouldn't I be happy LLMs have commoditized that aspect? No, not at all. Learning is the point . Tearing apart the black boxes that computers seem. This code thing. It's actually within your grasp with some effort. Linux itself, programming languages. They're not magic, despite some programmers being absolute wizards. You can understand it too. Now? Oh, just tell the machine what you want in prose. It will do something. Something . That's terrifying. "But there's this fun trick where you can ask the AI to be a professional engineer with many years of experience and it will produce better code!" I uh… What? Oh, is that how we're supposed to interact with them. Swaying the statistical process in a more favourable direction. Yikes. This does not inspire any confidence at all. Time and time again I see mentions on how AI-written code introduces bugs in very subtle ways. In ways that a human wouldn't, which also makes them harder to catch. I don't want to review the ridiculous amount of code that LLMs produce. I want to be the one writing the code. Writing the code is the fun part . Figuring out the solution comes before that, and along experimentation, takes the longest. But once the code you've written behaves the way you wanted it, that's the payoff. There is no joy in having a machine guess some code that may very well do something completely different the next time you prompt it the same. As others have put it very eloquently before me, LLM-written text is "a cognitive DoS ". It's spam. It destroys trust. I don't want to read an amalgamation of code or answers from the collective internet. I want to know people's thoughts. So please, respect my time, or I'll make that choice myself by disengaging with the content. Embrace AI or get out -- GitHub's CEO Out we go then. If not GitHub, where to go? GitHub pages makes it extremely easy to push some static HTML and CSS and make it available everywhere reliably, despite the overall GitHub status dropping below 90% for what feels like every day. I would need to host my website(s) somewhere else. Should I do the same with my code? I still enjoy being part of the open source community. I don't want to just shut it all down, although that's a fate others have gone through . Many projects larger than mine struggle with 'draining and demoralizing' AI slop submissions , and not just of code . I have, thankfully, been able to stay out of that for the most part. Others have not . I thought about it. Unfortunately, another common recurring theme is how often AI crawlers beat the shit out of servers, with zero respect for any sensible limits. Frankly, that's not a problem I'm interested in dealing with. I mean, why else would people feel the need to be Goofing on Meta's AI Crawler otherwise? Because what else can you do when you get 270,000 URLs being crawled in a day. Enter Codeberg . A registered non-profit association. Kord Extensions did it , Zig did it , and I'm sure many others have and will continue to do it. I obviously don't want this to end in another monopoly. There are alternatives, such as SourceHut , which I also have huge respect for. But I had to make a choice, and Codeberg was that choice. With the experience from the migration, which was quite straightforward ↪9 , jumping ship again should I need to doesn't seem as daunting anymore. Codeberg's stance on AI and Crawling is something I align with, and they take measures to defend against it. So far, I'm satisfied with my choice, and the interface feels so much snappier than GitHub's current one too! But crawling is far from the only issue I have with AI. They will extract as much value from you as possible, whether you like it or not. They will control every bit that they can from your thoughts. Who they? Well, the watchers: how openai, the US government, and persona built an identity surveillance machine that files reports on you to the feds . Putting aside the wonderful experience that the site's design provides (maybe I should borrow that starry background…), the contents are concerning . So I feel very validated in the fact that I've never made an attempt to use any of the services all these companies are trying to sell me. I don't want to use them even if I got paid . Please stay away, Microslop . But whether I like it or not, we are, unfortunately, very much paying for it. So Hold on to Your Hardware . Allow me to quote a part from the article: Q1 hasn’t even ended and a major hard drive manufacturer has zero remaining capacity for the year So yeah. It's important to own your hardware. And I would suggest you own your code, too. Don't let them take that away from you. Now, I'm not quite at the point where I'm hosting everything I do from my own home, and I really hope it doesn't have to come to that. But there is comfort in paying for a service, such as renting a server to host this very site ↪10 , knowing that you are not the product (or, at least, whoever is offering the paid service has an incentive not to make you one.) Some people pair the move from GitHub to Codeberg along statichost.eu . But just how bad can hosting something youself can get anyway? Judging by the amount of people that are Messing with bots , it indeed seems there are plenty of websites that want to keep LLM crawlers are bay, with a multitude of approaches like Blocking LLM crawlers, without JavaScript or the popular Anubis . If I were to self-host my forge, I would probably be Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers out of need too. Regardless of the choice, let's say we're happy with the measures in place to keep crawlers busy being fed garbage. Are we done? We're protected against slop now, right? No, because they're doing the same. To those that vibecode entire projects and don't disclaim they're done with AI: your project sucks . And it's in your browser too. Even though I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla . Because I don't care how well your "AI" works . And No, Cloudflare's Matrix server isn't an earnest project either. If that's how well AIs can do, I remain unimpressed. I haven't even mentioned the impact all these models have on jobs either ↪11 ! Cozy projects aren't safe either. WigglyPaint also suffers from low quality slop redistribution. "LLMs enable source code laundering" and frequently make mistakes. I Am An AI Hater . That's why we see forks stripping AI out, with projects like A code editor for humanoid apes and grumpy toads as a fork of Zed. While I am really happy to see that there are more and more projects adopting policies against AI submissions , all other fronts seem to just keep getting worse. To quote more comments , AI cause: environmental harms , reinforce bias , generate racist output , cause cognitive harms , support suicides , amplify numerous problems around consent and copyright , enable fraud , disinformation , harassment and surveillance and exploit and fire workers. Utter disrespect for community-maintained spaces. Source code laundering. Questionable ties to governments. Extreme waste of compute and finite resources. Exacerbating already-existing problems. I'm not alone thinking this . Are we expected to use AI to keep up? This is A Horrible Conclusion . Yeah. I don't want to have to do anything with it. I hope the post at least made some sense. There are way too many citations that it's hard to tie them neatly. Who knows, maybe one day I'll be forced to work at a local bakery and code only on my free time with how things are going. 1 I get them now. Though I prefer the terseness of no- or . ↩ 2 I like to think I'm quite pragmatic, and frankly, I've learnt to brush off a lot of things. Having thick skin has proven to be quite useful on the internet. ↩ 3 I kept working on C# GUI programs and toyed around with making more game-y things, with Processing using Java, which also naturally lent itself to making GUI applications for Android. These aren't quite as relevant to the story though (while both Stringlate and Klooni had/have seen some success, it's not nearly as much.) ↩ 4 My project-naming skills haven't improved. ↩ 5 Those are the good ones. There are worse , and then there is far worse. Stay safe. ↩ 6 And for some reason I also have 740 followers? I have no idea what that feature does. ↩ 7 Quite ironic… If you're one of those that also closes the tab when they see AI being mentioned, thanks for sticking by. I'm using this post to vent and let it all out. It would be awkward to address the topic otherwise, though I did think about trying to do it that way. ↩ 8 As much as I try to avoid engaging with it, I'm afraid I'll eventually be forced to learn those patterns one way or another. ↩ 9 I chose not to use the import features to bring over everything from GitHub. I saw this as an opportunity to start clean, and it's also just easier to not have to worry about the ownership of other people's contributions to issues if they remain the sole owner at their original place in GitHub. ↩ 10 I have other things I host here, so I find it useful to rent a VPS rather than simply paying for a static file host. Hosting browsable Git repositories seems like an entirely different beast to hosting static sites though, hence the choice of using Codeberg for code. If all commits and all files are reachable, crawlers are going to have fun with that one. ↩ 11 Even on my current job the company has enabled automatic Copilot code-reviews for every pull request. I can't disable them, and I feel bad opening PRs knowing that I am wasting compute on pointless bot comments. It just feels like an expensive, glorified spell-checker. The company culture is fine if we ignore this detail, but it feels like I'm fighting an uphill battle, and I'm not sure I'd have much luck elsewhere… ↩
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