Git is unprepared for the AI coding tsunami

Jump to main content

Search

REG AD

DevOps

Git is unprepared for the AI coding tsunami

An influx of agents is pushing GitHub to the brink

Joab Jackson

Joab<br>Jackson

Published<br>fri 15 May 2026 // 21:15 UTC

Last month, Mitchell Hashimoto, HashiCorp co-founder, publicly declared that he was moving his popular open source Ghostty terminal emulator project from GitHub. GitHub runs the world’s largest service built on the Git distributed version control system, created by Linus Torvalds.<br>Once an enthusiastic user, Hashimoto grew disillusioned with service disruptions, and increasingly slow pull requests. “This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day,” he wrote.<br>Hashimoto was quick to defend Git itself: “The issue isn't Git, it's the infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc.”

REG AD

MORE CONTEXT

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

GitHub says sorry and vows to do better as uptime slips and devs complain

Microsoft boss tells investors the company is working to 'win back fans'

Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof

Many have blamed GitHub’s performance on Microsoft, which acquired the company in 2018. But to be fair, GitHub itself has been experiencing heavier-than-expected traffic thanks to a proliferation of AI-generated pull requests.

REG AD

In 2025, GitHub saw a 206 percent year-over-year growth in AI-generated projects measured by the use of Bash shell scripts, a widespread way of running agents. And more AI code means more bugs. Research from GitClear found that AI-generated code heaped 10.83 issues per pull request, compared to 6.45 for the old-fashioned human variety.<br>Our new agentic workforce is raising big questions about how the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) should evolve, and if Git should come along.<br>“Agents are nudging us toward a continuous flow,” warned Peco Karayanev, co-founder of DevOps platform provider Autoptic, which bridges Git-based deployments with observability tools for agent-based remediation.<br>Autoptic’s entire user base runs on some form of Git, either homebrew or from a service provider like GitLab.<br>Given the volume and magnitude of changes across repos, “we need git to start operating in a more continuous mode,” Karayanev wrote in an email interview.<br>Git operations, especially when used in GitOps-style automated deployments, still need to be managed by people. Updates, commits, pushes, merges are often yoked into sequences of “stop/go” episodes where someone has to hit enter on the keyboard a few times to continue the workflow, Karayanev noted. This model may not hold up once agents start getting priority.<br>A butler for Git<br>Git has always had its share of critics, especially those who use the tool daily.

REG AD

There may not be another piece of software that is so widely adopted and yet so inscrutable. Torvalds and other Linux kernel developers built Git in 2005 after frustrations with trying to shoehorn Linux code into the commercial BitKeeper tool. Linux, a global group project of mammoth proportions, required a distributed version control system able to support non-linear development of thousands of parallel branches.<br>Like any distributed system, Git can be difficult to understand.<br>One of the co-founders of GitHub, Scott Chacon co-wrote a book on using Git (2009’s Pro Git) and still he finds himself occasionally flummoxed by the version control system.<br>There are still “sharp edges” to Git, Chacon told The Register. “There's a lot of stuff that it doesn't do very well from a usability standpoint,” he said.<br>Chacon co-founded GitButler as a way to “rethink the porcelain” of Git, to make Git more suitable to modern workflows. (Last month, GitButler received $17 million in venture capital funding).<br>Think of GitButler as a super-powered Git client. It allows the developer to work on two different branches simultaneously, using a technique called virtual branching. It reconciles the code a developer is working on with the upstream code. They can reorder commits, or edit the comments of a previous commit. It offers richer metadata about the files being worked on. It can show which commits are unique to that branch.<br>Best of all, it eliminates what many developers call “rebase hell,” where merges into an updated codebase must be checked one at a time, a problem GitButler solves by keeping the user’s code synchronized with what is upstream.<br>Many of these actions GitButler offers can be done through the Git command itself – although Git’s command language, and its rules, can be so obtuse that “you will probably make a mistake at some point,” Chacon said.

REG AD

A Git for agents<br>Chacon believes GitHub’s current reliability issues stem from the current tsunami of agentic work.<br>This is “ironic” because GitHub was built to scale Git, he...