Mitchell Hashimoto is moving Ghostty off GitHub. For a developer who has been on the platform since 2008 declaring it no longer a place for serious work is a massive indictment of how Microsoft has handled the service.
Corporate rot and brittle plumbing
The decision follows a month-long log of GitHub’s dismal performance. Mitchell has been tracking outages that directly stall development, marking almost every day for a month with an ‘X’ where Actions or Pull Requests failed to function. It is a predictable trajectory for a Microsoft-owned property: ignore the underlying plumbing while aggressively shoving “AI” and telemetry into every corner of the UI.
We are being sold a future of predictive code completion while the actual CI runners are frequently face-down in the dirt. Microsoft seems more interested in building a corporate walled-garden than maintaining the gold standard for FOSS infrastructure. When the tool we rely on to ship software becomes an obstacle, the “convenience” of the platform is no longer worth the reliability cost.
The upstream shift
For the average Linux user, this move remains largely invisible. You likely install your software via a package manager. We don’t interact with the repository directly; we interact with the mirrors and binaries provided by our distro maintainers.
The real burden is at the source. It is the upstream maintainers and packagers who now have the task of migrating development workflows. The move is planned to be incremental, and Mitchell is currently shopping for a new home amongst both commercial and FOSS providers.
The convenience trap
There is a broader lesson here about our collective dependency on big tech. I am as guilty as anyone; I still have my Tailscale admin account tied to GitHub SSO because it was the path of least resistance. It is a lazy habit that creates a single point of failure. If Microsoft’s authentication service wobbles during the next recorded outage, the impact isn’t just a stalled pull request—it is being locked out of my account.
Big tech thrives on making things so “easy” that you don’t bother to set up a proper, sovereign alternative. We stick with it because “it just works,” right up until the moment it doesn’t.
What happens next?
The project will remain on GitHub as a read-only mirror for now to avoid breaking existing links, but the development heart is flatlining. Several practical hurdles remain, such as the exact timeline for the final cutover and finding a CI platform that isn’t as brittle as GitHub Actions.
Moving a project of this scale is a massive task, but it is a necessary one. If one of the industry’s most prolific developers thinks Microsoft has broken the platform, it is time the rest of us stopped making excuses for them.