Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’

Bemoans frequent outages that mean he’ll move Ghostty elsewhere

Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto has decided GitHub is so unstable it is “no longer a place for serious work,” and will therefore move his current project elsewhere.

Hashimoto’s current labour of love is Ghostty, a terminal emulator that The Register has praised for its speed and for adding “some interesting new wrinkles” to a very mature category of software.

Like many developers, Hashimoto used GitHub to work on the project, and in a Tuesday post declared himself a fan.

“I'm GitHub user 1299, joined Feb 2008,” he wrote, and since then has used it almost every day.

“GitHub is the place that has made me the most happy,” he revealed, and “always made time for it” – even during his honeymoon because the service is “where I've historically been happiest and wanted to be.”

“Some people doom scroll social media. I've been doom scrolling GitHub issues since before that was a word,” he admitted. “On vacations I'd have bookmarks of different projects on GitHub I wanted to study. Not just source code, but OSS processes, how other maintainers react to difficult situations. Etc. Believe it or not, I like this.”

He’s liking GitHub a lot less these days.

“I've been angry about it. I've hurt people's feelings. I've been lashing out. Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is irrationally personal,” he wrote.

The reason for his ire is the service has become unreliable.

“For the past month I've kept a journal where I put an ‘X’ next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work,” he wrote. “Almost every day has an ‘X’. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage.”

Hashimoto penned his post a few days before an April 28 incident that saw pull requests fail to complete due to an Elasticsearch SNAFU.

Incidents like that mean Hashimoto has decided GitHub “is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.”

“It's not a fun place for me to be anymore,” he lamented. “I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.”

The developer says he wants GitHub to improve, but “I also want to code. And I can't code with GitHub anymore. I'm sorry. After 18 years, I've got to go.”

He’s open to a return if GitHub can deliver “real results and improvements, not words and promises.”

But for now, he’s working to move Ghostty to another collaborative code locker.

“We have a plan but I'm also very much still in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS),” Hashimoto wrote. “It'll take us time to remove all of our dependencies on GitHub and we have a plan in place to do it as incrementally as possible.”

He’s doing the equivalent of leaving a toothbrush at a former partner’s house by leaving a read-only mirror of Ghostty on GitHub, and by keeping his personal projects on the Microsoft-owned service.

But Hashimoto’s moving his day job somewhere new.

“Ghostty is where I, our maintainers, and our open source community are most impacted so that is the focus of this change. We'll see where it goes after that,” he concluded.

After Microsoft acquired GitHub, many feared the software giant would inevitably bend the service into a more Redmond-centric operation that made life less pleasant for developers who aren’t tied to Windows and/or Azure ecosystems. Those fears largely proved unfounded and the service entrenched itself as the de facto place to work on and share code.

Hashimoto’s experience suggests that status is in peril and comes at a time Microsoft has admitted Windows has serious quality problems, in part because it forcibly injected AI into too many tools. The increasing prevalence of GitHub wobbles Hashimoto observed also coincide with Microsoft’s AI obsession. Make of that what you will. ®