Contradictory to the title, this message is not to the developers, developers don’t care what github ceo thinks, and they should know it. This might be for the management of other companies to allow using ai or integrate ai.
GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out.
Submitted 8 months ago by mesamunefire@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrace-ai-or-get-out-2025-8
Comments
Jocker@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Lev@europe.pub 8 months ago
Daily reminder that Codeberg is always the good alternative to corporate bastards like this idiot
foenkyfjutschah@programming.dev 8 months ago
i’m also looking forward for sourcehut.org
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Threatening remarks like that are why I learned PHPUnit, and yeah it made me become a better developer, but often times these are just empty statements.
AI is just another tool in my toolbox.
MoondropLight@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
Unit testing and TDD are awesome; but if you can avoid it: Don’t write things in PHP (unless it’s for work).
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I’ve written a few personal projects in Laravel too, I don’t mind modern PHP tbh.
redlemace@lemmy.world 8 months ago
such an easy choice …
antihumanitarian@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m a professional developer and have tested AI tools extensively over the last few years as they develop. The economic implications of the advancements made over the last few months are simply impossible to ignore. The tools aren’t perfect, and you certainly need to structure their use around their strengths and weaknesses, but assigned to the right tasks they can be 10% or less of the cost with better results. I’ve yet to have a project where I’ve used them and they didn’t need an experienced engineer to jump in and research an obscure or complex bug, have a dumb architectural choice rejected, or verify if stuff actually works (they like reporting success when they shouldn’t), but again the economics; the dev can be doing other stuff 90% of the time.
Don’t get me wrong, on the current trajectory this tech would probably lead to deeply terrible socioeconomic outcomes, probably techno neofeudalism, but for an individual developer putting food on the table I don’t see it as much of a choice. It’s like the industrial revolution again, but for cognitive work.
sobchak@programming.dev 8 months ago
I keep hearing stuff like this, but I haven’t found a good use or workflow for AI (other than occasional chatbot sessions). Regular autocomplete is more accurate (no hallucinations) and faster than AI suggestions (especially accounting for needing to constantly review the suggestions for correctness). I guess stuff like Cursor is OK at making one-off tools on very small code-bases, but hits a brick-wall when the code base gets too big. Then you’re left with a bunch of unmaintainable code you’re not very familiar with and you would to spend a lot of time trying to fix yourself. Dunno if I’m doing something wrong or what.
I guess what I’m saying is that using AI can speed you up to a point while the project accumulates massive amounts of technical debt, and when you take into account all the refactoring and debugging time, it results in taking longer to produce a buggier project. At least, in my experience.
antihumanitarian@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’ve used it most extensively doing Ruby on Rails greenfield apps, and also some JS front ends, some Python mid sized apps, and some Rust and Nix utilities. You’re absolutely right about it struggling with code base scale, I had to rework the design process around this. Essentially, design documentation telling the story, workflow documentation describing in detail every possible functionality, and an iteration schedule. So the why, what, and how formalized and in detail, in that order. It can generate the bulk of those documents given high level explanations, but require humans to edit them before making them the ‘golden’ references. Test driven development is beyond critical, telling it everywhere to use it extensively with writing failing tests first seems to work best.
So to actually have it do a thing I load those documents into context, give it a set unit of work from the iteration schedule, and work on something else.
It does go down some seriously wrong paths sometimes, like writing hacky work arounds if it incorrectly diagnosing some obscure problem. I’ve had a few near misses where it tried to sneak in stuff that would bury future work in technical debt. Most problematic is it’s just subtle enough that a junior dev might miss it; they’d probably get sent down a rabbit hole with several layers of spaghetti obscuring the problem.
AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s perfect for higher ups. They don’t care if what you release has bugs as long as you work on them when they pop up, they consider that part of your job. They want a result quickly and will accept 85% if it moves the needle forward.
These people don’t care about technical debt, they don’t care about exploits until it happens to them, then it’s how bad and how long to fix. No one cares about doxxes anymore, it’s just the cost of doing business. Like recalls.
This is perfect for CEOs and billionaires because they don’t care how something is done at a 35,000 foot view, they just want it now. AI is a nightmare of exploits that haven’t even begun to be discovered yet. Things that will be easily exploitable, especially by other algorithms.
Coders are just as effected by supply and demand, and the demand is for AI products.
Taldan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m finding AI effectively automates entry level jobs and interns. The long term implications is very few will be able to enter the field. What do we do when all the experienced engineers retire? How will we shift our economy to work for everyone under this model?
ragas@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Can you give an example of what those entry level jobs may be? Because I have yet to encounter a position where an AI would be as smart as an entry level person.
Rainbowblite@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Forward-thinking has never been capitalism’s strong suit.
rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
I don’t get it. AI is a tool. My CEO didn’t care about what tools I use, as long as I get the job done. Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done? They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Because like AI, your CEO is a tool.
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Because unlike with the other tools you use the CEO of your company is investing millions of dollars into AI and they want a big return on their investment.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 7 months ago
I don’t think these CEOs have quite figured out that LLM developers are creating something that can more easily replace a CEO than a developer.
DarkSurferZA@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Return? No, there is no return on investment from AI. If there really was a return to be had from Devs, you wouldn’t have to force them to use it.
This is a saving face and covering their asses exercise. Option 1 is “We spent the money, nobody’s using it, the bubbles gonna burst”, the other choice is “if we can ramp up the usage numbers before the earnings call, we can get some of that sweet investor money to buy us out of being mauled by our shareholders”.
It’s shitty management, making shitty decisions to cover up their previous shitty decisions
sobchak@programming.dev 8 months ago
I think part of it is because they think they can train models off developers, then replace them with models. The other is that the company is heavily invested in coding LLMs and the tooling for them, so they are trying to hype them up.
Jhex@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done?
Not just that… why do they have to threat and push for people to use a tool that allegedly is fantastic and makes everything better and faster?.. the answer is that it does not work but they need to pump the numbers to keep the bubble going
MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.
If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.
tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care
Tamo240@programming.dev 8 months ago
Alternatively, following their logic, keep the number of people and achieve massively higher productivity. But they don’t want that, they want to reduce the number of people having opinions and diluting the share pool, because its not about productivity, its about exerting control.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 8 months ago
Because they make money selling you the AI. It’s that simple.
CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
AI make money line go up. It’s not clueless, he’s trying to sell a kind of snake oil (ok, not “snake oil”, I don’t think AI is entirely bad).
ragas@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Snake oil is also not entirely bad. The placebo effect actually works.
0x0@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
Accurate description of most managers i’ve encountered.
bless@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft is forcing AI on all the employees
ksh@aussie.zone 8 months ago
They all need to be sued for unethical “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish” practices again
TeddE@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Honestly I’ve been recommending setting up a personal git store and cloning any project you like, I imagine the next phase of this is Microsoft making a claim that if Copilot ‘assisted’ all these projects, Microsoft is a part owner of all these projects - in a gambit to swallow and own open source.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I am surprised they aren’t embracing it… I would. You immediately get some vague non person to blame all your failures on.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 8 months ago
I asked an AI to generate me some code yesterday. A simple interface to a REST API with about 6 endpoints.
And the code it made almost worked. A few fixes here and there to methods it pulled out of it’s arse, but were close enough to real ones to be an easy fix.
But the REST API it made code for wasn’t the one I gave it. Bore no resemblance to it in fact.
People need to realise that MS isn’t forcing it’s devs to write all code with AI because they want better code. It’s because they desperately need training data so they can sell their slop generators to gullible CEOs.
shads@lemy.lol 8 months ago
I got stuck today in a part of my workplace where they have one of the local shitty radio stations playing, couldn’t have my headphones in as people kept coming up and talking to me, and a shitty pop music mashup plays and it struck me, this is AI.
To clarify there is some shitty artist who gets the credit, but its just a selection of clips crossfaded and slightly processed into each other to make a new “song” out of a dozen pop songs. No actual creativity, no new material, just a quasi algorithmic blending of songs so that some soulless talentless grifter can claim they are an artist.
It gets deeper though, as mixed in there are songs that couldn’t actually be performed live and acoustic due to the amount of sound engineering and vocal processing that went into the original versions of these songs.
The whole thing is turning into an Ouroboros, they have worked out how to make perfectly bland, meaningless music and now the snake is eating its tail as the industry consumes that slop to manufacture more slop.
Yet deeper, why does this beige bullshit get air time… Why its our old friend capitalist market forces, no one passionate about music wants to make this shit, its the people who want the fame and money and view music as the means to that end.
We know that AI makes people dumber, we know that it leads to the atrophy of skill and talent, and we know the only motivation for its use is capitalist. AI is pop music.
For what its worth I used italics on AI as I categorically refuse to believe this garbage is actually artificial intelligence. I am reasonably certain that actual artificial intelligence is the next fusion power, it’s going to be “only a few years away” from being viable until well after I die, but its just too good a marketing term to leave it alone while we make do with these stunted chinese rooms.
Wow that rant blew up.
sturger@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Good analogy. Basically:
- People play music and people enjoy listening to music.
- Businessman inserts himself between the musician and the audience to “deliver the music”.
- Businessman charges listeners huge money to deliver music, gives no money to musicians.
- Businessman the decides to replace the musician with a robot (e.g. “AI”)
- Businessman explodes market. Listeners leave. Businessman gets bailout from government.
shads@lemy.lol 8 months ago
See I also think that there is something to be said about how there’s people still out there making new music, performing it, recording. But business has captured the market and is drowning out the smaller players. The signal to noise ratio gets so skewed that even if the best song you never heard is only a web search away you may never listen to it because your streaming service will never play it. But the soulless corporate remix of a remix of a cover of a song from the 80s, you hear that 4 times a day because they have a marketing budget and algorithmic influence.
frostysauce@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Tell me you’ve never written a song without telling me you’ve never written a song…
shads@lemy.lol 8 months ago
Maybe I am misreading your comment here, but I am going to take it on face value, I have never written a song. In an interesting note believe cutting pages out of a bunch of books and sticking them together in a new binding wouldn’t make a compelling read, I also have never written a novel.
I seriously respect people who can write songs, I would imagine they have or had passion for the art. I seriously doubt any song writer is out there thinking "Holy fuck this song is amazing, I really hope some shithead producer crops the chorus and mashes it together with a bunch of other tracks to make it completely meaningless. That would make it perfect.’
shads@lemy.lol 8 months ago
Ahh down votes in lieu of a substantive argument. Love it. If there wasn’t a thread to pull on in all that word salad that would unravel the tapestry do you think maybe there’s something to my take on this matter?
Anyway, don’t care, this isn’t Reddit so a downvote doesn’t mean shit, and you at least read some of my post. To quote a somewhat famous Doctor “Don’t you think she looks tired?”
vxx@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yep, autotune rappers have been pushed for years, and I always suspected it’s to make the transition to AI music easier.
Fedditor385@lemmy.world 8 months ago
AI can only deliver answers based on training code developers manually wrote, so hod do they expect to train AI in the future if there is no more developers writing code by themselves?
Also, small fact is that they invested so much money into AI, that they can’t allow it to fail. Such comments never came from people who depend on AI adoption.
Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
It’s like all those companies who fast tracked their way into profits by ignoring the catastrophic effects they were having on the environment… Down the road.
Later is someone else’s problem. Now is when AI-pushers want to make money.
I hate where things have been heading.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
same as how it goes on the stock market? they don’t care about the long term, but only the short term. what happens on the long term is somebody else’s problem, you just have to squeeze out everything, and know when to exit.
they are gambling with our lives. but not with theirs. that’s (one of) the problem: they are not fearing their lives.
mr_satan@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Two words: good fucking luck!
ragas@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Error: Buffer overflow.
vane@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Does github copilot include attributions and licenses from projects it copy paste code from or it’s just stealing and pretending like nothing happened like all other AI ?
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Message to Github CEO: your job is one thing AI is best at.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Expectation: High quality code done quickly by AI.
Reality: Low quality AI generated bug reports being spammed in the hopes the spammers can get bug bounty for fixing them, with AI of course.
aliser@lemmy.world 8 months ago
does “embracing AI” means replacing all these execs with it? or is it “too far”?
Soup@lemmy.world 8 months ago
No, they’re all super special and have an “instinct” that a robot could never have. Of course the same does not go for artists or anyone who does the actual work for these “titans of industry”.
*by “instinct” we, of course, mean survivorship bias based on what is essentially gambling, exploitation, and being too big to fail.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Way ahead of you, looked for GitHub alternatives such as codeberg ages ago.
medem@lemmy.wtf 8 months ago
“Managing agents to achieve outcomes may sound unfulfilling to many”
No shit, man.
foenkyfjutschah@programming.dev 8 months ago
it’s also sort of a description of his own role, innit?
PlexSheep@infosec.pub 8 months ago
I have a lot of projects, many OSS and some private. I self host forgejo for my private stuff and also have a lot of my oss there.
Still, I currently use GitHub as my main git service, since it’s the most polished code forge and their ci servers are free and fast as fuck. The only other thing keeping me there is the network effect in the sense that I like my projects to be more discoverable, not that anyone gives a shit about my code besides a few friends and randos.
If they get annoying, it’s trivial to move. I got the infrastructure set up, and forgejo federation is coming.
alvyn@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Is his message: “let us scrape your code or go away, and we gonna scrape it anyway” note: scrape = steal
JackbyDev@programming.dev 8 months ago
Booooooooooo
_AutumnMoon_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
I’ve always hated GitHub glad to see it finally is going to crumble
biotin7@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Ok, we go now
MITM0@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah but where ? What’s the ideal replacement for Github ?
sobchak@programming.dev 8 months ago
For open source stuff, Codeberg is good. For private stuff, just git + ssh is good. Gitlab and Bitbucket are fine for corporate stuff, I guess. An organization could just self-host a Forgejo (or Gitlab) instance as well.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 8 months ago
real messages: embrace AI, because i still need to grift from investor’s money, because AI is just a hype"
Cocopanda@lemmy.world 8 months ago
But you forget how stupid venture capitalists have become.
DancingBear@midwest.social 8 months ago
MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I don’t trust Copilot to make basic suggestions, let alone edits, on an html file.
iglou@programming.dev 8 months ago
Oh I’m already out, but only of your shitty products.
imposedsensation@lemmynsfw.com 8 months ago
Sounds like a desperate tactic to show value to investors who are skeptical of all the insane level of cap ex… not to mention all the customers who don’t want to pay for this garbage
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Doors that go like this | | not like this / \
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Part of the joke is who even constitutes “value investors”. As the MAG7 bloat the S&P, it’s increasingly just a handful of companies passing the same dollar back and forth as fast as possible, with the expectation that they’ll get bailed out by the Feds when the game is up.
Sad thing is, they’re probably right. Trump’s trying to get the Fed to loosen rates on the heels of an inflationary wave in order to guarantee enough exit liquidity before the market crashes.
Then we’ll get another brutal privatization wave, with conservatives preaching budget hawkery in order to justify abolishing Medicare, SS, national parks, public education, anything that can be liquidated for a quick buck.
NoodlePoint@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Embrace? With so many devs constantly being laid off, how about NO?
Octavio@lemmy.world 8 months ago
[deleted]crimsonpoodle@pawb.social 8 months ago
I like the idea of it; yet you can’t host private repos. I don’t want to be locked in to GitHub but as someone starting their career it’s important to show that you’re working on stuff. Hence I worry that moving away from GitHub will negatively impact my interviewing prospects.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 8 months ago
You can with some caveats. It has to be stuff like configs or a project you intend to make FOSS later.
I’ve never had a job check my GitHub, but I could give Codeberg too.
brown567@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
MehBlah@lemmy.world 8 months ago
We will see corporate douche.