AI load breaks GitHub – why not other vendors?

The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Hit reply and share it with me.

Today, we cover:

1. Load from AI breaks GitHub – but why not other vendors? GitHub’s reliability is less than one nine, and getting worse. Prolific open source contributor, Mitchell Hashimoto, is quitting GitHub because he thinks it’s not suited for professional work. GitHub’s leadership blames the 3.5x increase in service load as the cause of degradation – or it might be self-inflicted.

2. Anthropic’s speedrun to destroy trust. Anthropic could do no wrong until recently, but in the past month, that’s all changed. Silently nerfing Claude Code, banning companies from Claude, and baffling price rises all add to a sense that Anthropic is in its “extraction” era of generating more revenue for the same or worse service.

3. Industry pulse. Dramatic price increases at GitHub Copilot, explosive growth at Codex, Google scrambling to build a good coding model, Cursor might be bought by SpaceX, AI agent deletes car business, and more.

4. Mitchell Hashimoto & the “building block economy.” Ghostty’s creator finds that open source “building blocks” are the best way to win massive adoption by software components – but it’s got harder to build a business on top of open building blocks.

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GitHub’s reliability has been beyond unacceptable recently: last month, third party measurements pinned it at one nine (right at 90%). This month, reliability has been down to zero nines – 86% – as per a third-party tracker, and last week, things got even worse: a frankly embarrassing data integrity incident, more outages, and a partial explanation from GitHub, eventually.