The next GitHub is not worth winning — David Poblador i Garcia
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David Poblador i Garcia<br>Senior Technologist, Advisor
Founder at All Tuner Labs
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David Poblador i Garcia<br>Senior Technologist, Advisor
Founder at All Tuner Labs
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Aug 20, 2026
The next GitHub is not worth winning
Git has been distributed since 2005, but everything we built around it (review, CI, issues, releases) is not, and that layer is now doing work that will never be collaborated on. A working session today is five worktrees and five agents, four of them deleted before lunch, and every one currently gets a remote branch, CI runs and a row in somebody's database. That is not GitHub failing. It is us sending throwaway work to a system built for work that lasts, because it is the only path our tools know. The answer is not another forge, since that war costs billions and is available to about five companies. It is a staging area: experiment locally where it is fast and private, and graduate to GitHub when a project earns the network effects. That gap is unoccupied not because it is hard but because there is no way to bill for it.
On 6 August, GitHub Actions was degraded for nine hours. At peak, 71% of workflow runs failed outright on infrastructure errors, and three quarters of the ones that survived were delayed by more than five minutes. On 11 August, the GraphQL API spent two hours timing out. On 17 August, the whole thing went down worldwide: roughly 20% error rates across the web interface and the API, roughly 50% on archive and raw content downloads, with Actions, Webhooks, Issues, Pull Requests and Copilot all failing together.
In between those dates, SpaceX closed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, the largest startup acquisition on record. And on the 19th, Cursor published a long, genuinely excellent piece about how they store git at scale.
I wrote in April that GitHub’s problem is that it became the thing everything else assumes. I still think the diagnosis was right. I want to revise the conclusion.
First, the part that deserves saying again
GitHub lowered the barrier to collaboration for an entire industry. It standardised how we work: the fork, the pull request, the review, the merge. It ran critical infrastructure for over a decade, quietly expanded from git hosting into CI, compute, package distribution and security scanning, and gave most of it away for free to anyone who asked.
Nothing below is “GitHub is bad at this”. The problem I want to talk about is genuinely hard, and the people working on it are good at it.
What actually broke
Two things, and only one of them is about scale.
The first is coupling. Look at what fails together on a bad day: Actions, Webhooks, Issues, Pull Requests, the API, Copilot. That is not six independent products having a coincidence. That is one system with shared fate, and it is the direct cost of the ecosystem being as rich as it is. The same deep integration that makes Actions worth using is what makes Actions fail when the API does. You cannot have the first without buying some of the second.
You can watch this happen in public. Between 1 and 18 August, GitHub’s own status history records seventeen separate incidents, two of them rated critical. Not one bad week. A cadence.
The second is that the workload changed shape. GitHub’s own Octoverse numbers: 630 million repositories, 230 new ones created every minute, 43.2 million pull requests merged per month and rising 23% a year, close to a billion commits pushed in 2025, up 25%. Not growth in the abstract. Growth of a quarter, every year, on a system where a bad deploy takes out a fifth of the developers on earth.
And the composition changed too, not just the volume. GitHub described the flood of high-volume, low-quality AI-generated contributions as “a denial-of-service attack on human attention”. Those are their words, in their own report. When the platform’s own analysis of its ecosystem reaches for that metaphor, something has moved.
So: a very hard problem, growing 25% a year, run by people who are good at it, in an architecture where the parts share fate because that is what made them valuable. That is the honest...