Zig Quits GitHub, Says Microsoft's AI Obsession Has Ruined the Service 68
The Zig Software Foundation has quit GitHub after years of unresolved GitHub Actions bugs -- including a "safe_sleep" script that could spin forever and cripple CI runners. Zig leadership puts the blame on Microsoft's growing AI-first priorities and declining engineering quality. Other open-source developers are voicing similar frustrations. The Register reports: 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. 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."
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."
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Microsoft's growing AI-first priorities and declining engineering quality
I don't feel Microsoft engineering quality has been declining. It's the same crap again and again.
Microsoft has a serious culture problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has a serious culture problem, they'd better address right now or they are going to become Boeing.
They see to think nobody can live without them a jaw dropping bugs in commercial products they charge enterprises a lot of money for licenses are ok to go live with.
where is the QA - I mean goodness the 'password' entry button was missing on Windows 11 last week, and the advice was "just click where it should be"
WTF? - Where is the QA testing? Just because all the Tests pass in the CI/CD pipe does not mean you are ready to ship without someone actually trying to 'use the software'
Re:Microsoft has a serious culture problem (Score:4, Interesting)
On the bright side, if the GitHub Action documentation has glaring holes, you are sometimes permitted to fix it yourself.
Re:Microsoft has a serious culture problem (Score:5, Insightful)
All true, but it should be added this isn't a recent thing.
Oh, the AI buzz is recent, but MS has had quality control problems in flagship software for decades. How many control panels are there? How many "kinda" work? How many versions are we going on with that kind of nonsense? And instead of fixing this, they focus on AI and...notepad...for some fucking reason.
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And instead of fixing this, they focus on AI and...notepad...for some fucking reason.
Because for the past 30 or so years, it has worked very well for MS to keep their main products barely useable, rely on lock-in and chase the next big thing so they can get their dirty hands on it early and lock more people into more products.
Re:Microsoft has a serious culture problem (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.tomshardware.com/s... [tomshardware.com]
I can blame Microsoft for all the other bugs in Windows 11 that hit the mainstream channel, but for this one, if you sign up to try beta versions (aka Insider channel), don't complain there will be bugs.
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A beta version is a version that should have no know bugs (but is may have a few unknown). You should notice the button is missing before tagging a version as beta.
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That's the definition of a Release Candidate (RC), a beta can have minor non-fundamental known bugs that will be resolved by the time the RC is about to be released.
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Nah, an rc is a version that is supposed to also have no unknown bugs. That can be a beta that ran stable for long enough, or the last pre-version after the betas before the release. Alpha is bleeding edge without much care about bugs, beta is usable but supposed to have bugs, rc is something that in the best case can be identical to the released version. Therefore release candidate. If everything goes well, you just remove the rc label and have your release.
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I admit, Microsoft may use another definition. Beta can be shipped to the user, if its broken we ship an update.
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if you sign up to try beta versions (aka Insider channel), don't complain there will be bugs.
That is exactly wrong. Beta versions are there to find bugs. If nobody complained about them, they won't be found. So if you try beta versions, please DO complain about bugs.
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They've had this "culture problem" for decades ... but monopolies can save you from a lot of "culture problems".
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BUUUUUT as a side note, who's using Zig? Uber and TigerBeetle - the latter is interesting, but does anyone actually have "live" products with it? (I read this HN thread about it but it sounds like their big "title" user basically never went live and dropped it.)
Re: Microsoft has a serious culture problem (Score:3)
The language is in beta. The last release 0.15 completely overhauled I/O. The 0.16 release is expected to further overhaul with async/await. You have to have a special kind of team to develop software on such a language. You have to be willing to occasionally rewrite a bunch of code cause the standard library has changed.
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since engineers are way more expensive than testers.
And way less capable than a random end user at hitting the most bizarre edge cases by doing things that don't make any sense at all.
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the 'password' entry button was missing on Windows 11 last week, and the advice was "just click where it should be"
This explains a lot, too. They have been pushing consumer Windows to be "passwordless" and after signing into your Microsoft password and setting up a PIN and/or biometrics, the account has no password login option (if you didn't sign into the Microsoft account with a password). But I do wonder if this password option hiding glitch was a carryover from that hiding and maybe you can still click the button there too.
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Ticking new boxes furthers the careers of company drones and bureaucrats. Maintenance doesn't.
Re: Microsoft has a serious culture problem (Score:3)
Revenue comes from the Sales organization.
Missing features are what prevent sales.
Sales then tell Product Managers to prioritize a niche feature to help one potential sale.
Pam then prioritize a proof of concept implementation to be added to the current release cycle, over any other priority.
Rinse and repeat. Work to get the code base to production quality level is almost never reaching the top of the priority queue.
Even google has that issue where promotion committees put a much higher value on customer vis
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Indeed. Although I would submit they _are_ already Boeing. The complete hack of Exchange online, the actor-token disaster, the Sharepoint-disaster, their part in the Crowdstrike disaster, AD still being a mess, Win11, Office, etc. There is not a single well-usable, reliable and secure major product they make.
The problem is, while MS has decidedly killed massively more people than Boing when comparing aggregated lost lifetime, all these are non-spectacular, there are no smoking data-centers with ambulances r
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What about slashdot? (Score:1)
How come I get randomly logged out? Why does the notifications icon randomly not send me to the notifications page (sometimes I press on it dozens of times and it does nothing)? Why does the refresh button not even appear when coming back to the front page after a pause? Is slashdot using vibe coding, or do I just blame this on human slop?
Re: What about slashdot? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think slashdot has had any actual developers working on its since the early 2000s. It's a mature legacy codebase, destined to run as-is until it can't anymore, then go away.
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All we have to do is convert Slashdot to Wordpress host! Easy fix!
Re: What about slashdot? (Score:4, Interesting)
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If I understand correctly, its not easy to create new user accounts here either.
Something about emailing the mods to create an account.
As such, this is probably a dieing website, since I doubt many people will be interested in emailing a mod to get an account created.
Re: What about slashdot? (Score:1)
What about slashdot?
Maybe I should make a post complaining about the quality of a site completely unrelated to GitHub or anything else in the featured article. I could use the same tenuous relationship to the topic at hand that you did.
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Re: What about slashdot? (Score:1)
Can AI fix slashdot's random bugs?
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Maybe I should make a post complaining about the quality of a site completely unrelated to GitHub or anything else in the featured article. I could use the same tenuous relationship to the topic at hand that you did.
You basically have to. It's not like there are any regularly posted community governance threads or anything like that.
Artificial Intelligence (Score:3)
arrogant (Score:1, Flamebait)
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I would take an AI hallucination over level 1 support any day. At least the advice would sound plausible.
It can't get any worse (Score:2)
"Microsoft's ... declining engineering quality". Not so. Their engineering quality cannot decline. It has always been at minus infinity.
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Indeed. With raising security, reliability and usability demands, it is just becoming more and more obvious that they do not have it.
AI Shittification (Score:2)
Zig (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the first I've even heard of Zig. Has anyone here used it before?
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So nice to see a couple of people making this sort of comment. I was afraid no one would.
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It's been around for quite a while. It's seems to be a replacement for C and C++. Some see it as an alternative to Rust, but it doesn't have the same safety features. I would love to find a language that's a replacement for C++ that can be used to migrated existing code bases to, but none of them are, really. That's partly C++'s fault. It's very hard to interoperate with C++ code and libraries from other languages, without layers of wrappers (PySide comes to mind for Qt). Even interop between different C+
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And I will stick with C. (Embedded systems guy here) Next time push a button, on a lift, or your rice cooker, that's C going on there.
Re: Zig (Score:2)
I've used it a fair bit. The language is in beta and the standard library still changes pretty notably between releases. It's often not possible to use a library from one version in a later version. So, I would definitely not recommend it for professional development at this time.
However, the language is pretty awesome. It truly fits a niche where you could see this replacing C in another decade or so. It's both more modern and less error prone than C, while also in some cases giving you tighter control ove
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Looks like they've Moved 'ZIG." (Score:3)
For great justice.
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"TAKE OFF EVERY ZIG"
-Andrew Kelley
Ah the classic memes are still good.
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Codeberg (Score:5, Informative)
Codeberg is very nice, all the more so because it's a non-profit that's made efforts to protect itself from risks of enshitiffication. You can self host its entire system, Forgejo, which, while not at the same level as Gitlab, also requires exponentially less resources for something that implements everything most people want or need, and only misses a small number of things the power users want. You can easily self host on a Pi, if you don't have a server set up for that kind of thing.
Codeberg largely exists because of issues with Gitea's management and signs it was about to follow Gitlab in the enshittification path. While those fears haven't been realized, Codeberg forked Gitea into Forgejo, and that seems, now, to be where the mindshare is.
(I honestly think we're not going to see any progress in computing back to positive things if those with the skills to self host stuff don't start doing so and don't start working on making it easier for everyone to self host everything. But that's a different rant. Point is, Codeberg is great if you're not ready to do that yet, and Forgejo is even better if you are.)
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What I love about Git ... (Score:3)
... is that it's a protocol designed and built by someone who knew what he was doing (Linus Torwalds) resulting, among other things, in the fact that migrating your upstream Git repo away from a commercial service like Github takes something like 20 seconds, if you're having a slow day.
Git is one of those things that bring the genius of well planned and built software to full display.
BTW, if you want to host your own web-interfaces upstream repo, Gitea [github.com] is a very neat open source software for doing exactly that.
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Some of the command names that were chosen might be questionable, but the basic functionality of git works quite well. I just ported a personal project over from svn, made more complicated by not starting with a proper svn repo layout (git-svn would only import one half or the other depending on the options I chose), but I was able to wrangle the strings of commits into what I needed. And now that I've got the git repo constructed, I can replicate it easily.
(I was actually surprised that git-svn imports us
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... is that it's a protocol designed and built by someone who knew what he was doing (Linus Torwalds) resulting, among other things, in the fact that migrating your upstream Git repo away from a commercial service like Github takes something like 20 seconds, if you're having a slow day.
The difficulty of migrating away from Github is when you've built your entire deploy pipeline and QA process around it, which is what a lot of companies are doing lately.
Eye on the door (Score:2)
It's only a matter of time until GitHub becomes fully enshittified.
It was a logical and fateful grab for MS (Score:2)
Move all Zig (Score:2)
Move all Zig (source, to another hosting service).
For great justice.
vibe (Score:2)
'vibe-scheduling'
I guess "vibe-something" is going to be the anti-word of 2026. People are slowly waking up to what it actually means to let the AI do the work.
I'm not dissing AI, I'm using it extensively myself and there's a few AI whitepapers with my name on them. But like any tool, it can be great when used correctly and ruin your day when not.
I'm fed up with the obsession too (Score:2)