Mitchell Hashimoto once dreamed of working at GitHub. He built Vagrant in hopes it might land him a job there. He opened the site every single day for 18 years. Now he says he cannot code with it anymore.
The HashiCorp co-creator and author of Terraform announced in late April that his fast Zig-based terminal emulator Ghostty would leave the platform. The decision came after months of planning. It coincided with yet another major outage. But the problems ran deeper. Hashimoto kept a journal. He marked an “X” for nearly every day in the prior month when GitHub blocked his work.
“This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day,” he wrote on his personal site. The post mixed affection with raw anger. He admitted to lashing out publicly. He said the platform had failed him personally. And he cried while writing the announcement.
Hashimoto joined GitHub in February 2008 as user 1299. The service shaped his career. Breakups, late college nights, even his honeymoon — he turned to open source there. He doom-scrolled issues the way others scroll social feeds. He studied maintainer behavior and project governance. GitHub aligned his hobby, work and passion in one place. His own account details the depth of that attachment.
That history makes the departure sting. Ghostty carries more than 50,000 stars. The project demands daily collaboration among maintainers and contributors. Frequent downtime in pull requests, Actions and issues turned productive hours into frustration. On the day he drafted the post, a GitHub Actions outage halted PR reviews for two hours. A separate Elasticsearch failure days later took pull requests offline across the site.
GitHub’s own April 2026 availability report admitted 10 incidents causing degraded performance. The company pointed to rapid growth, architectural coupling and large-scale automated abuse. One search outage on April 1 left 100 percent of queries failing for over two hours. Post-incident reviews highlighted scaling challenges that echoed through tightly connected systems. The GitHub Blog outlined those numbers and root causes.
Hashimoto’s frustration struck a chord. Developers shared similar stories of interrupted workflows. Some projects had already departed for Codeberg or self-hosted options. Yet Ghostty’s exit carried extra weight. The maintainer who loved the platform most had reached his limit. He plans a read-only mirror for discoverability. Personal projects stay put for now. The main effort focuses on Ghostty and its community.
Discussions with commercial and open-source providers continue. The migration will happen incrementally to limit disruption. Hashimoto said he would consider returning only after seeing concrete improvements. Words and promises no longer suffice.
The episode highlights broader pressure on GitHub. Microsoft acquired the company in 2018. Early worries about shifting priorities proved premature. But recent years brought heavier AI integration. Copilot and agentic tools increased load. Automated bots and agents generate traffic that strains infrastructure. Hashimoto himself posted on X about companies gripped by what he called “heavy AI psychosis.” He argued rational conversation had become impossible in some circles. The May 15 tweet referenced the idea that shipping bugs no longer mattered because agents would fix them. That mindset, he suggested, contributes to the overload.
Industry observers connect the dots. Outages in Actions and search often trace back to surging automated activity. GitHub has strengthened defenses against abuse. Still, the April report showed the fight continues. Enterprise teams report monthly disruptions. A 30-minute outage might seem tolerable until it hits during a release window.
Hashimoto’s move arrives at a moment of transition for infrastructure tools. His former company HashiCorp completed its $6.4 billion sale to IBM in February 2025. The integration has progressed. Terraform stacks, policy workflows and agentic infrastructure previews debuted at HashiConf 2025. IBM positions the combined portfolio for hybrid cloud and AI-driven automation. Project Infragraph aims to create real-time graphs connecting infrastructure, applications, ownership and policy. Those efforts target the same organizations that rely daily on stable developer platforms.
Yet reliability at the foundation matters. When the code hosting layer falters, downstream tools suffer. Platform teams building internal developer portals expect GitHub to function as infrastructure. Repeated outages erode confidence. They push conversations about alternatives. Self-hosted GitLab, Gitea, or even newer decentralized options gain attention.
Hashimoto struck a measured tone despite the emotion. He praised GitHub’s engineers and past product excellence. He expressed sorrow for hurting feelings with prior criticism. The attachment remains. “I want it to be better, but I also want to code,” he wrote. That tension captures the dilemma many face. Love for a tool collides with the need for dependable service.
Recent coverage amplified the story. The Register reported on the departure and its implications for serious development work. Analysts noted that GitHub’s uptime in April fell well short of the 99.9 percent SLA in practice for power users. Community threads on Reddit and X debated whether the platform had grown too large to maintain consistent performance.
GitHub has responded with more transparent status pages and detailed post-mortems. It continues investing in scaling. The company faces the classic innovator’s problem: success brings usage that exposes limits. AI features accelerate that curve. Agents that review code, generate pull requests and run workflows multiply the load.
For now, Hashimoto focuses on execution. Ghostty will relocate. The terminal has earned praise for speed and native features on macOS and Linux. Its departure won’t collapse GitHub. But it signals a shift. A founder who once saw the platform as home now seeks elsewhere. Other high-profile projects may follow if reliability does not improve.
The open source world watches closely. Maintainers balance community needs against personal bandwidth. When the tooling gets in the way, something eventually gives. Hashimoto chose to protect his ability to ship. That choice, born of daily pain after 18 years of devotion, carries weight. It forces a question many prefer to avoid. How much unreliability will the industry tolerate before it looks for new foundations?
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