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GitHub has become “completely neglected”, according to a scathing review of the platform from the project leader behind Zig.
Zig is one of the most admired programming languages, according to the 2025 Stack Overflow developer survey. But the man overseeing the project has chosen to pull it from the popular GitHub code repository – due to the platform leaving one of its automated AI code updating tools “completely neglected”.
The project leader behind Zig, Andrew Kelly, did not immediately respond to an interview request. However, in a blog post explaining the decision, he detailed his opposition to the direction of travel GitHub was taking following its acquisition by Microsoft seven years ago.
“The clock started ticking [post-acquisition],” he wrote. “’Please just give me five years before everything goes to shit,’ I thought to myself.”
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Issues with Actions
Kelly cited technical issues with GitHub Actions, the platform’s workflow automation system, which lets developers run scripted tasks such as building, testing, and deploying their code in response to events in a repository.
“Actions has inexcusable bugs while being completely neglected,” Kelly wrote. “After the CEO of GitHub said to ‘embrace AI or get out’, it seems the lackeys at Microsoft took the hint, because GitHub Actions started ‘vibe-scheduling’; choosing jobs to run seemingly at random,” he explained in his blog post.
He’s not alone in his concerns. “If AI is deployed simply to increase the speed of which code is created without solving the quality and maintenance problems, then it’s a recipe for accelerating developer burnout and technical debt,” says Tom Finch, engineering leader at Chainguard. But what’s different is that Kelly chose to do something about it.
“It’s abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it,” Kelly wrote. “Priorities and the engineering culture have rotted, leaving users inflicted with some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework in the name of progress.”
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Broader implications
The move away from GitHub has garnered attention in the dev community, in part because of Zig’s (and Kelly’s) place within it. It’s also a key moment in a broader, ongoing debate about the merits of AI within the job.
“Andrew raises many valid points,” says Guillaume Moigneu, Field CTO at cloud application platform Upsun. “Open-source contributors now face an influx of low-quality, AI-generated merge requests,” he explains.
But Moigneu isn’t certain leaving GitHub is the answer. “While I fully understand the motivations of Zig’s creator to leave GitHub for a more transparent solution like Codeberg, the issues raised here need to be addressed across the industry,” he says. “A platform change won’t solve them.”
Jeremy Howard, the co-founder of Answer.ai and Fast.ai, believes that AI is threatening the future of “software craftsmanship”. He says AI “encourages folks to not take the craftsmanship and the design and the architecture seriously, and instead just devolves into ‘Get my bug queue to be shallower and make the symptoms go away.’”
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But relying on agentic AI like Actions to do so can be harmful, particularly given the likelihood of errors in AI-created code. “I’ve seen a senior engineer [when] a bug gets reported and it’s like, ‘Let the agentic loop rip’, and it’s completely wrong,” says Howard. “If it had been merged, it would have made the product way worse.”
