What follows GitHub?
It seems fairly clear that, as far as product lifecycle goes, GitHub is in its “Azure metered billing” stage. I don’t mean this as a negative value judgment in of itself — who am I to argue that GHE is not, from a certain utilitarian point of you, more valuable to the world than all of the things I’m about to kvetch about? — but two things seem quite clear:
- The core experience of using GitHub for normal, GitHub-shaped things (reviewing pull requests; browsing a codebase) has degraded substantially over the past five years. Views are slower and buggier.
- GitHub has not innovated significantly on the broad process of managing and producing software since Copilot (2021), which while valuable felt then and now like a bit of a sidequest relative to their core interface and mission. Their two major non-enterprise ships in the past five years have been: Projects (2022), which I would describe as a solid iterative improvement on GitHub Issues that is still strictly worse than Linear and Jira; Discussions (2020), which is a clear and obvious success but is slowly being eaten away by Discord and other walled gardens.
Lest you argue that I am being uncharitable: as I write this, the splash page for Github shows an above-the-fold carousel of images with five captions (Code, Plan, Collaborate, Automate, and Secure). Three of those images show Copilot; one shows Actions (which, it should be said, I do find really useful!); one shows Projects. The story is much the same below the fold: the goal of GitHub as an organization has shifted largely to a) get larger organizations using GitHub and b) to have all organizations start adopting Copilot.
The above is only problematic if you believe that there is room to grow in the realm of “hosting and owning source code", and that the current model of reviewing a pull request by reading the modified files in alphabetical order is not in fact a global maximum. Linear’s interested in this space; Pierre is, too (though Pierre appears, at least right now, to be much more interested in Being Pierre).
I’m not well equipped to prognosticate here: all I know is that this is not the tool of the future, and whoever replaces GitHub will have a narrative arc of incumbency displacement that will feel obvious and trite in retrospect.