GitHub COO on AI 'Shit Code' overload that many users say has been degrading coding platform
GitHub's COO Kyle Daigle has gone on the record about the scale of what's hitting the platform—and the numbers are staggering. In response to a viral post from popular developer personality ThePrimeagen, who credited GitHub for "handling the amount of shit code added over the last three months," Daigle confirmed the growth is unlike anything the platform has seen before. There were one billion commits across all of 2025. Now GitHub is processing 275 million commits per week—putting it on pace for 14 billion this year if growth holds linear. GitHub Actions has exploded from 500 million minutes per week in 2023 to over 2.1 billion minutes in a single week this year. As for the shit code remark? Daigle's response was characteristically dry: "As a fine purveyor of hand-crafted shit code for many years, I'm not gonna weigh in on that. "
GitHub was never built for AI agents, and it shows
The core problem, as the software developer put it bluntly, is that "GitHub has been around since April 10, 2008. Agents came out yesterday. GitHub was in fact NOT designed for agents." OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger echoed the frustration, noting he keeps hitting API quota limits—infrastructure that was clearly designed with humans in mind, not autonomous coding agents hammering endpoints around the clock. That mismatch is now playing out in real time. GitHub CTO Vlad Fedorov confirmed in a separate blog post that agentic development workflows have accelerated sharply since late December 2025—pushing repository creation, pull request activity, API usage, and large-repository workloads to record highs simultaneously. The company originally planned for a 10x capacity increase back in October 2025. By February 2026, it became clear they needed 30 times today's scale. April's uptime has since slipped below 85 percent—far below the platform's stated 99.9% SLA.
Two major incidents, thousands of broken repositories
Two incidents in particular brought things to a head. On April 23, a merge queue bug silently reverted previously merged code for 658 repositories and 2,092 pull requests. On April 27, a botnet attack overwhelmed GitHub's Elasticsearch cluster, knocking out search-dependent UI across pull requests, issues, and projects. Neither involved data loss—but both hit developers where it hurts most: their ability to actually ship work. The backlash was swift. Ghostty developer Mitchell Hashimoto—GitHub user number 1,299, on the platform since February 2008—announced he was leaving, after logging nearly daily outage disruptions in a personal journal for a month. His departure became a visible flashpoint, prompting a public apology from Fedorov and a separate response from Daigle, who acknowledged the team has been "keeping heads down on infra" while usage climbs steeply. Daigle did leave developers with one note of optimism: PR performance has already improved by up to 40 percent in some cases, with more work underway. Whether that's enough to stop the exodus is another question entirely.