In this blog entry from August 2025, I mentioned that I was moving away from GitHub. It took me a while — mostly because I started moving my projects to Sourcehut and just made my commits there, forgetting a bit about my GitHub presence, but lately, I have been feeling a itch just at the idea of GitHub and Microsoft.

This is going to be a short article: there is not a single repository of mine on GitHub anymore.

# Why?

Well, the main reason is mostly AI. AI is everywhere. People¹ cannot talk about something without mentioning AI. AI. AI. ChatGPT. Claude. Anthropic. LLMs. Agentic code. And all of that is deeply concerning me. People are getting dumber and dumber, we are forced to use what was initially thought to be a tool — let’s not talk about how that tool was created and trained, refer to ¹ — into something organic that takes the place of the gullible developer wanting to use the new shiny modern idea, to a point where people now cannot really work without it. Lately, there was an outage with I don’t recall which LLM, and people started to panic:

— Claude Code doesn’t work anymore! How am I going to implement that feature?!

This is just tragic. I remember the old days when we were implementing data structures on whiteboards. Was it annoying? Yes. Was it heavily suboptimal (in the sense of actually implementing something)? Yes. Was it good to learn? Yes, because we were forced to think in place of the machine, how it’s going to work at runtime, understand the most fundamental interactions between components. Today, solving a problem is a discussion between the naive programmer, and the AI agent that just applies what past people who actually learned how to do it wrote in the first place. Give it enough time and we will eventually reach a point where those people won’t be able to move anymore because their beloved agentic friend will tell them lies.

Anyway, Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018. It was already a sign to move on. It’s a real pity, because many of us grew with GitHub — before it, I was on TuxFamily with SVN; good memories! We loved pre-Microsoft GitHub. It was the place. But as I grew up, I started to realize that Git forges are just centralizing a process that was initially thought to be decentralized (git through emails, even if you want to pull from trees; see man git-request-pull).

I discovered Sourcehut years ago and fell in love with it. The idea of a simple platform with simple services. The email git workflow. It all fell into place: using a (small) tool to do one thing, and it do it right². Migrating my projects away from GitHub to Sourcehut was surprisingly not that hard:

• Contributions go through patches. Everyone can send a patch, either via the mailing lists, or directly to me. The contributions are more organic, more human. People must read the CONTRIBUTING.md file if they want to get on contributing. It might sound like a regression, but not forcing people to have an account on the forge host is a real sweet to me.
• Sourcehut provides mailing lists, issue trackers, and a build ecosystem (you have to pay for it, but it’s pretty inexpensive for how good it is; you cann ssh in the runners! yeah I know, crazy coming from GitHub) that is just excellent.
• It’s FAST. And it just works
• If you pay, you also get an access to soju, an IRC bouncer. I am mostly on IRC, since FOSS and Discord has always been a proprietary platform — I never understood why projects would set up headquarters there… anyway.

All of that to say that migrating is a bit weird at first. You need to configure git send-email. You need to learn about mail user agents, etc. but once you are done with it, it’s just so pleasant to use. There is this feeling of getting back to craftmanship and just contributing with human beings who want to build solid, free and open-source software, without any bias by corporate organizations.

# What it means

I completely removed my projects from GitHub. Not archived: I deleted them, as I don’t want Microsoft to have the short path of local repositories to train their shitty LLMs. Of course, they might still have the code hidden on their machines; I don’t think there’s any way around that. But at least I can comfort myself by thinking that I intentionally tried to remove them. I’m currently letting my (empty) account there if I need to collaborate with projects that haven’t migrated to something like Codeberg — and I think I need to write a blog article on this one, because I think people are wrong about it — or anything else.

If you were using any of my GitHub projects, either directly via git, or through a packaging system like crates.io or hackage, the most important / recent ones have already been migrated to Sourcehut. For older projects, that do not have links updated, feel free to send a patch!

I know it can be scary and disrupting, but the idea of just enjoying coding and working on FOSS projects without having to deal with Microsoft anymore is just worth it.

Good luck, and keep the vibes.