Article URL: https://depot.dev/blog/github-is-the-wrong-shape-for-this-new-world Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103910 Points: 39 # Comments: 26

A lot of attention is given to the overall performance and reliability of GitHub. Rightfully so. But I think the more interesting thing to question is the paradigm that we use with GitHub. It's the wrong shape for how we build software today, and we need better tools, workflows, and infrastructure primitives that meet the new demand. We live in a fundamentally different world for developing software today. Are there familiar things? Definitely. Are there things from the past that we can use in this new world? Absolutely. Code is still code after all. As a mentor used to preach to me, it's bytes in and bytes out. The bottlenecks we underinvested in are still around, from source control to CI/CD to code review and even deployments. Only now they are killing the newfound velocity we have. The pain of these bottlenecks is compounding because everyone can now contribute code. Code has expanded outside of an engineering team and into other teams like sales, support, and marketing. Meaning, a 10-minute build is felt by literally everyone in a company, not just a small subset. This has profound implications, as it calls into question the assumptions and things we have accepted as normal. It raises questions that I think are still unanswered: Ask these five questions of five different people, and you'll most likely get five different answers. This is what I mean when I say that software engineering has changed. It's not just that LLMs and agents can generate an entire feature off a five-sentence prompt. That's a tool we are using. It's that the entire paradigm around software engineering is now drastically different and moving at a velocity that we simply can't keep up with. Assumptions we have made are crumbling with each passing release.