Humans Don't Work at GitHub

On 30 June, at nine minutes past three in the afternoon, a machine at GitHub decided I was a machine. It locked my account. My repositories, my profile, my Pages, all of it went 404 to the world. Not deleted. I could still see everything from the inside. Just switched off, so that to everyone else I had simply never existed. No email. No warning. No reason. And I was asleep when it happened.

What it saw

I pulled my own security log before I got angry, because I wanted to be fair. I will not pretend the machine hallucinated. My tools had been busy: more than a thousand OAuth tokens minted and rotated, hundreds of repositories created and destroyed by automation running in my name. To an abuse detector, that is not a person. That is a bot.

Here is the part that still stings. I have never used GitHub Copilot. Not once. Yet two Copilot apps churned 963 of those tokens on their own, from January to June, an integration I never turned on, working under my name while I was somewhere else living my life. I did not use the feature. The feature used me. And then it got me flagged.

A door with no one behind it

To appeal, GitHub sends you to a screen that asks you to prove you are human. A captcha. It never loaded for me.

That is the whole thing in one picture. A red error saying it cannot verify me, and a green checkmark underneath saying I am verified. Both at once. No text ever arrived. No ticket ever opened. No person ever answered, because there is no person. It is machines all the way down.

I am not special. Michal Flaška lost around a thousand repositories exactly this way, pulled his logs like I pulled mine, and found the same culprit: “the bad actor didn’t delete anything. GitHub’s own automation did.” He waited forty days. Another developer gave up by day ten and left for Codeberg, where I am now. There are dozens of us saying the same three sentences. Same 404. Same silence. Same machine.

What I actually signed up for

I subscribed to a tool. Machines I would orchestrate, machines I would give orders to. Build this. Run that. Host my work. I never signed up to be judged by machines I do not command, machines that flag me, lock me, and shut a door in my face while no human watches. The only machines I ever agreed to work with are the ones that take my orders, never the ones that give them to me.

A multi-trillion-dollar company decided humans do not scale, and quietly removed them. What is left flagged me, gated me, ignored me, and a marketing page calls it support.

So keep it

GitHub, you do not have to restore my account. Please, don’t bother.

I care about code more than almost anything I make, and I cannot keep what I love in a place where no one like me is home. Thinking about you now makes me nauseous, and I do not need that in my life.

I took my work, and I left. I am not coming back.

And I did not just leave. I became a member of Codeberg e.V., the non-profit behind the place I moved to, where humans vote on its direction. A machine decided I did not belong at GitHub. At Codeberg, I have a vote.

Addendum, three hours later

I published this post, shared it in four places, and went about my morning. Three hours later, out of curiosity, I clicked the support link one more time.

The wall was gone.

No SMS screen. No captcha refusing to verify me. The support portal simply loaded and offered me two situations to choose from.

It walked me to a form titled “Reinstatement request.” One of its radio buttons reads, word for word: “I can login, but my profile and contributions aren’t visible to others.” My whole catastrophe, pre-printed as a checkbox. I was never an edge case. I was a category common enough to have its own form field.

The billing page, meanwhile, now tells me three things at once. A banner at the top asks me to please update my payment method. A toast announces my billing information was successfully updated. And a warning box below them both says I cannot update my billing information, because my account is flagged and ineligible for transactions. The machine orders the repair, reports the repair, and forbids the repair, in one screen.

I wrote in this post that the appeal only works when you are loud in public, and I hoped to be wrong about that. The door that stayed shut while I knocked for two days moved by itself the same morning people were reading about it. Draw your own conclusion about who it moves for.

I am a solo developer in Zagreb with a blog about running Swift everywhere, making Swift do anything, rebuilding Apple frameworks nobody asked me to rebuild. My megaphone is a paper cup. If the sound carried, it is because strangers passed it from hand to hand until someone with a real megaphone heard it.

To be clear about the score: I am still blocked. The noise did not open the door. It opened the waiting room. For everyone locked out this way without an audience, even the waiting room stays shut.

The form is there now. I did not ask...