Zig Programming Language quits GitHub, blames Microsoft's AI obsession and crumbling infrastructure

Zig quits GitHub, gripes about Microsoft's AI obsession

Zig prez complains about 'vibe-scheduling' after safe sleep bug goes unaddressed for eons The Foundation that promotes the Zig programming language has quit GitHub due to what its leadership perceives as the code sharing site's decline. The drama began in April 2025 when GitHub user AlekseiNikiforovIBM started a thread titled "safe_sleep.sh rarely hangs indefinitely." GitHub addressed the problem in August, but didn't reveal that in the thread, which remained open until Monday. The code uses 100 percent CPU all the time, and will run forever That timing appears notable. Last week, Andrew Kelly, president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation, announced that the Zig project is moving to Codeberg, a non-profit git hosting service, because GitHub no longer demonstrates commitment to engineering excellence. One piece of evidence he offered for that assessment was the "safe_sleep.sh rarely hangs indefinitely" thread. "Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs while being completely neglected," Kelly wrote. "After the CEO of GitHub said to 'embrace AI or get out', it seems the lackeys at Microsoft took the hint, because GitHub Actions started 'vibe-scheduling' - choosing jobs to run seemingly at random. Combined with other bugs and inability to manually intervene, this causes our CI system to get so backed up that not even master branch commits get checked." Kelly's gripe seems justified, as the bug discussed in the thread appears to have popped up following a code change in February 2022 that users flagged in prior bug reports. The code change replaced instances of the posix "sleep" command with a "safe_sleep" script that failed to work as advertised. It was supposed to allow the GitHub Actions runner - the application that runs a job from a GitHub Actions workflow - to pause execution safely. "The bug in this 'safe sleep' script is obvious from looking at it: if the process is not scheduled for the one-second interval in which the loop would return (due to $SECONDS having the correct value), then it simply spins forever," wrote Zig core developer Matthew Lugg in a comment appended to the April bug thread. "That can easily happen on a CI machine under extreme load. When this happens, it's pretty bad: it completely breaks a runner until manual intervention. On Zig's CI runner machines, we observed multiple of these processes which had been running for hundreds of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks." The fix was merged on August 20, 2025, from a separate issue opened back in February 2024. The related bug report from April 2025 remained open until Monday, December 1, 2025. A separate CPU usage bug remains unresolved. Jeremy Howard, co-founder of Answer.AI and Fast.AI, said in a series of social media posts that users' claims about GitHub Actions being in a poor state of repair appear to be justified. "The bug," he wrote, "was implemented in a way that, very obviously to nearly anyone at first glance, uses 100 percent CPU all the time, and will run forever unless the task happens to check the time during the correct second." I can't see how such an extraordinary collection of outright face-palming events could be made He added that the platform-independent fix for the CPU issue proposed last February lingered for a year without review and was closed by the GitHub bot in March 2025 before being revived and merged. "Whilst one could say that this is just one isolated incident, I can't see how such an extraordinary collection of outright face-palming events could be made in any reasonably functioning organization," Howard concluded. GitHub did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While Kelly has gone on to apologize for the incendiary nature of his post, Zig is not the only software project publicly parting ways with GitHub. Over the weekend, Rodrigo Arias Mallo, creator of the Dillo browser project, said he's planning to move away from GitHub owing to concerns about over-reliance on JavaScript, GitHub's ability to deny service, declining usability, inadequate moderation tools, and "over-focusing on LLMs and generative AI, which are destroying the open web (or what remains of it) among other problems." Codeberg, for its part, has doubled its supporting membership since January, going from more than 600 members to over 1,200 as of last week. GitHub has not disclosed how many of its users pay for its services presently. The code hosting biz had "over 1.3 million paid GitHub Copilot subscribers, up 30 percent quarter-over-quarter," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the company's Q2 2024 earnings call. In Q4 2024, when GitHub reported an annual revenue run rate of $2 billion, GitHub Copilot subscriptions accounted for about 40 percent of the company's annual revenue growth. Nadella offered a different figure during Microsoft's Q3 2025 earnings call: "we now have over 15 million GitHub Copilot users, up over 4X year-over-year." It's not clear how many GitHub users pay for Copilot, or for runner scripts that burned CPU cycles when they should have been sleeping. ®

This programming language is quitting GitHub

The Zig Programming Language is officially quitting GitHub and moving its main repository over to Codeberg. The reasoning is a collapse in engineering quality and an aggressive push toward artificial intelligence tools. It is the most direct shot at Copilot from a developer I've seen in some time. Andrew Kelly, the president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation, said in an announcement that the countdown started ticking the moment Microsoft acquired GitHub seven years ago. He said the biggest problem was that the priorities and engineering culture had completely rotted, leaving the platform feeling sluggish and broken thanks to bloated JavaScript frameworks. The breaking point for the foundation seems to be GitHub Actions. Kelly called its bugs inexcusable and noted the feature is being totally neglected. He said that the GitHub CEO told everyone to embrace AI or get out; the infrastructure started failing. The team noticed that GitHub Actions began what they call "vibe-scheduling," choosing jobs to run seemingly at random. This, combined with other bugs, caused their continuous integration system to get so backed up that new commits, even on the master branch, were not being checked. Rather than spending donation money on more CI hardware just to work around the crumbling infrastructure, Zig has opted to switch hosting providers entirely. Kelly pointed specifically to a long-standing issue with the 'safe_sleep.sh' script. This script was implemented in February 2022 to replace the basic POSIX 'sleep' command. The goal was to let the Actions runner safely pause execution. The bug in the code was obvious: the script would use 100 percent CPU and run forever if the task didn't happen to check the time during the exact one-second interval when the loop was supposed to return. Zig core developer Matthew Lugg noted that this is easily triggered on CI machines under extreme load. On Zig's CI machines, they observed multiple processes running for hundreds of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks. This shift also directly targets GitHub's (and ultimately, Microsoft's) AI obsession. The Zig Software Foundation holds a strict no-LLM and no-AI policy. The foundation feels that GitHub is aggressively pushing tools like "file an issue with Copilot" right in everyone's face, leading to policy violations within the project. GitHub Sponsors may be the reason that many don't want to leave, and why we haven't seen a mass exodus yet. That product was key to Zig's early fundraising success and still makes up a large chunk of its revenue today. The Zig project has already made the move permanent. The GitHub repository is now read-only. The new canonical repository is hosted on Codeberg, a non-profit Git hosting service. They chose a simple migration strategy to avoid vendor lock-in. They are leaving all old issues and pull requests on GitHub, but new issues will start at number 30,000 on Codeberg to keep the numbering unambiguous. This move isn't isolated. The creator of the Dillo browser project is also planning a departure, citing concerns over JavaScript reliance, declining usability, and the platform's heavy focus on LLMs and generative AI. It seems GitHub's focus is clearly on monetization through Copilot, which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says has over 15 million users and accounts for roughly 40% of GitHub's annual revenue growth. I think sacrificing the core developer experience for AI revenue is a mistake that will cost them the trust of major projects. Source: Ziglang via The Register

Why Companies are Quitting GitHub | AIM

The platform began looking like an input pipeline for Microsoft's AI strategy. For years, GitHub sat at the centre of the software world. Though developers might move away from an AI tool like Cursor, Windsurf, or even GitHub Copilot, migrating from GitHub as a platform was never thought of. Well, until now. A slow stream of exits has turned into something more visible. Individuals are walking out. Small studios are walking out. Entire open source communities are packing up their repos and shifting them to Codeberg, Forgejo, Sourcehut or their own servers. Their reasons may be different, but the conclusion is the same. GitHub no longer feels like neutral ground. The Dillo browser project is a sharp example. It began as a simple attempt to keep an old web browser alive after its original domain was lost in 2022. What followed is the kind of cautionary tale open source projects fear. The old Dillo website vanished. Someone else bought the domain and filled it with "AI generated ads". Mailing lists disappeared. Bug records vanished. The only surviving copy of the code came from a contributor who had created their own backup. That kind of wipeout tends to change how maintainers think. Rodrigo Arias Mallo, who now maintains Dillo, wrote in his blog that he uploaded everything to GitHub for safety. Then he slowly realised GitHub created its own set of risks. He wrote that GitHub "barely works without JavaScript", which means Dillo itself cannot open its own issues, pull requests or logs. He called the website "resource hungry" for no reason at all, and said the platform had turned into a single point of failure. "It is controlled by a single entity which can unilaterally ban our repository or account," he said. That fear now sits in the back of every maintainer's mind, because GitHub has become so central that a ban feels like a kind of lockout from the public square. AIM reached out to GitHub but the company declined to comment at the moment. Mallo said that performance issues made it worse. Pages load slower. The site now assumes everyone always has a fast connection. The push model of notifications breaks the quiet, offline style of development that smaller projects still prefer. What bothered him more was the social side. Issues get crowded by people who are not part of the project, and the moderation tools are thin. It burns maintainers out, fast. Some on Hacker News say that the reason simply seems philosophical, but Mallo believes there are other concerns. Then came the larger shift. Eldred Habert, a programmer working on security, also wrote a blog that got featured on Hacker News. He claimed that GitHub's push toward AI locked him out. He wrote that these walls come from the "trend of over-focusing on LLMs and generative AI" that is crushing the open web. Mallo from Dillo had a similar observation. GitHub's role in that trend made him uncomfortable enough to move the project away completely. The result is a tiny, hand-built alternative, a new domain. For Dillo, a self-hosted cgit instance. A bug tracker written in C that stores every issue as plain text and turns them into a static HTML page. Everything runs on a small VPS. Everything is mirrored across Codeberg and Sourcehut. Everything is signed with OpenPGP so the project can still prove its identity even if the DNS goes down again. Mallo's solution is specific to a small browser from another era, but the reasons echo across other exits. Habert, who moved to Codeberg in September, cited the same reason in fewer words. "Mounting pressure from GitHub pushing AI solutions harder and harder" was the tipping point. "Partnering with Elon Musk (Grok now being supported)". "I simply don't agree with that platform's policies". Another said they left as "a form of protest" and now donate to Codeberg. But, these are just philosophical takes. People are leaving GitHub not because they found a better feature set somewhere else. They are leaving because they do not align with the direction GitHub is going in. That direction is now tied directly to the future of Microsoft ever since Thomas Dohmke, the former CEO, left GitHub. The Ars Technica report from August captured the change. GitHub will be folded into Microsoft's CoreAI division. The GitHub CEO is leaving. Microsoft is not replacing the role. The company said GitHub will continue its "mission" inside the AI group. This came after months of deep integration work around Copilot. It also followed a breach earlier in the year, in which Copilot exposed private code repositories of large companies by accident. The accidents did not slow the rollout. Microsoft kept pushing Copilot deeper into workflows, deeper into editors, deeper into the GitHub interface. That is the moment the anxiety around GitHub changed. Some developers say that the platform stopped looking like a neutral place to store code and began looking like an input pipeline for Microsoft's AI strategy. Users on Hacker News and Reddit read the signs in a similar manner. The announcement that GitHub will sit inside the AI division looked like an echo of what happened to Skype. One comment summed up the mood: "MS bought Skype just to shut it down a few years later without any alternative." This is why developers talk about moving before something breaks. Some said GitHub Actions have become unreliable. Others said the site UI has become slow and heavy. Most alternatives are not perfect either. Testers say GitLab is heavy to run. Gitea has awkward UI moments. Codeberg's bot checks annoy some users. Sourcehut is fast but uses mailing lists for patches. Forgejo feels like a sweet spot for many small teams because it is light, written in Go, and easy to host. One studio that moved two years ago said the switch had "positive effects" across the board, because their entire workflow stayed alive even when their internet was down. These exits are not happening at the scale that would threaten GitHub's dominance. They are happening for reasons that are quieter, personal and sometimes, philosophical. But they mark a shift that would have been unthinkable five years ago. GitHub used to be the obvious choice. It no longer is.