Mitchell Hashimoto Just Broke Up With GitHub After 18 Years — And He's Not Wrong

Mitchell Hashimoto published something yesterday that reads less like a tech announcement and more like a divorce filing.

He's leaving GitHub. After 18 years. The man is GitHub user #1299 — joined February 2008, before most of today's junior devs learned to type. He built Vagrant on GitHub. Co-founded HashiCorp on GitHub. Created Ghostty, the blazing-fast GPU terminal emulator that developers have been flocking to, on GitHub. He once joked in a conference talk at age 20 that he hoped Vagrant would get him a job at GitHub. (It didn't, but he built a multi-billion-dollar company instead, so I think he's fine.)

And now he's done. The post is worth reading in full, but here's the part that should make GitHub's executive team lose sleep:

"For the past month I've kept a journal where I put an 'X' next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work. Almost every day has an X. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage. This is no longer a place for serious work."

That's not hyperbole from some rando on Hacker News. That's the guy who built Terraform. That's someone who's opened GitHub every single day for over half his life. He says he doom-scrolled GitHub issues before doom-scrolling was a word. On his honeymoon, while his wife was still asleep, he was on GitHub. The man is a GitHub superfan to a degree that's frankly a little concerning.

And he's leaving.

This Isn't an Isolated Tantrum

The timing of Mitchell's post landed in the middle of what's starting to look like a genuine movement. On the same day, HardenedBSD announced they were moving to Radicle, the peer-to-peer decentralized code forge. The HN front page also featured "Before GitHub" — a nostalgic 528-point post about what open source collaboration looked like pre-GitHub. Mitchell himself isn't saying where Ghostty is going yet — he's "in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS)" — but Radicle is the obvious contender for anyone paying attention.

And let's be clear about what kind of outages we're talking about. These aren't "GitHub is slow for 5 minutes" incidents. GitHub Actions has been a recurring dumpster fire. PR reviews blocked for hours. CI pipelines that simply don't run. The infrastructure around Git — issues, PRs, Actions, the whole collaboration layer — has become unreliable enough that maintainers of projects with real velocity are losing entire workdays to it.

The Infrastructure Layer Nobody Wanted to Think About

Here's the uncomfortable thing this surfaces: we built the entire open source ecosystem on a single company's uptime. Every npm install, every go get, every cargo build that pulls from GitHub — it all assumes GitHub is up. We've been living in a monoculture and calling it a standard.

Mitchell is too classy to say "I told you so," but HashiCorp's entire thesis was that infrastructure should be declarative, reproducible, and not dependent on any single provider's mood. It's almost poetic that the founder of that company is now the canary in the coal mine for the fragility of our actual development infrastructure.

Radicle's pitch is the obvious antidote: Git repos replicated peer-to-peer, issues and patches stored as signed Git objects, no central server to go down because there is no central server. It's not as polished as GitHub. The UX isn't as smooth. But it doesn't lose you 2 hours of PR review on a Tuesday because someone at Microsoft pushed a bad config.

What Actually Matters Here

If this were just one prominent developer having a bad month, it'd be a footnote. But look at the HN numbers on Mitchell's post: 2,847 points, 843 comments. That's not "interesting take, bro" — that's "holy shit, finally someone said it." The developer community has been quietly furious about GitHub's reliability for months, and Mitchell just gave that frustration a name and a face.

The question isn't whether Ghostty leaving GitHub matters for Ghostty — Mitchell will figure out hosting, he's Mitchell Hashimoto. The question is whether this is the moment the dam breaks. When the creator of Terraform says your platform isn't reliable enough for serious work, other maintainers listen. And when there's a viable alternative that doesn't require trusting any single company, the calculus changes.

GitHub isn't going to disappear tomorrow. But the assumption that every serious open source project must live there? That assumption died on April 28, 2026. Mitchell Hashimoto killed it with an 18-year love letter that ends with "I've got to go."

The rest of us should be asking what our own "X journal" looks like — and whether we've just been tolerating a level of broken that should have been unacceptable all along.