Summary

Mitchell Hashimoto announces that Ghostty, his terminal emulator project, will be leaving GitHub due to persistent reliability issues. He reflects on his deep, 18-year personal connection to GitHub as user #1299, describing it as the place that has made him happiest throughout his life. Despite this emotional attachment, he explains that near-daily outages have made GitHub untenable for serious work, blocking PR reviews and CI pipelines for hours at a time. The move will be incremental, with a read-only mirror kept on GitHub, while his personal projects remain there for now.

Key Insight

Even the most devoted users will eventually leave a platform when persistent reliability failures make it impossible to do serious work, no matter how deep the emotional attachment.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 5

  Some might call this sick, but my hobby and work and passion all align and for most of my life they got to also live in one place on the internet: GitHub.

• 8

  I love GitHub more than a person should love a thing, and I'm mad at it.

• 7

  This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.

• 6

  I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.

• 7

  After 18 years, I've got to go. I'd love to come back one day, but this will have to be predicated on real results and improvements, not words and promises.

• 4

  Did you know I started Vagrant (my first successful open source project) in large part because I hoped it would get me a job at GitHub?

Tone

reflective, personal, bittersweet