Why Zig Left GitHub: Actions Failures, AI and Codeberg

What actually broke

The Zig Software Foundation's move to Codeberg, a nonprofit git-hosting service run by a Berlin-based German association and funded by donations rather than a corporate parent (it hosted more than 300,000 repositories and 200,000 user accounts by November 2025), traces back to a specific bug, not a general vibe. A GitHub Actions script called safe_sleep.sh could spin forever if a scheduling interval was missed, and once it did, the stuck process kept a CI runner occupied indefinitely. Zig developer Matthew Lugg described runs that stayed alive for hundreds of hours, silently tying up two of the project's runner services for weeks at a time. Someone reported the bug in April 2025; a fix merged on August 20; the GitHub thread tracking it stayed open until December 1, five days after Zig announced its move to Codeberg. [1][3][9]

By foundation president Andrew Kelley's account, the backlog got bad enough that pull requests, and even commits to the master branch, stopped getting checked at all. He summarized GitHub Actions' scheduling as picking jobs to run seemingly at random, a habit he called "vibe-scheduling," and wrote flatly: "Actions has inexcusable bugs while being completely neglected." [3][1]

The line Kelley quoted

Kelley tied the outage to leadership, not just engineering: "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'." Read on its own, the line sounds like a direct quote of Thomas Dohmke, GitHub's chief executive at the time, addressing GitHub staff. [1][3]

The primary source is looser than that shorthand suggests. "Either you embrace AI, or get out of this career" is not a sentence Dohmke wrote in his own voice about GitHub employees; it is a quote from one of twenty-two software developers he and colleague Eirini Kalliamvakou interviewed for a piece called "Developers, Reinvented," published August 3, 2025, on Dohmke's personal GitHub Pages site rather than GitHub's own blog. Dohmke and Kalliamvakou present the line approvingly, as evidence of where developer sentiment was heading, but the ultimatum itself belongs to an anonymous interviewee describing the software profession generally, not a directive Dohmke issued to GitHub's workforce. [5]

Atlas interpretation: Timing complicates the story further. Dohmke announced on August 11, eight days after the post went up, that he would step down as GitHub's CEO by the end of 2025, and that Microsoft would not name a direct successor: GitHub's leadership would instead report into Microsoft's CoreAI organization, split across separate executives for revenue and engineering, product, and AI strategy. By the time Kelley invoked "the CEO of GitHub" in his November 26 post, the role itself had already been folded into Microsoft's broader AI division rather than held by one person, a stranger and more specific situation than a single executive dictating a policy from the top. [8][5]

Dillo, a different complaint the same week

Four days after Zig's November 26 announcement, Dillo, a minimalist graphical web browser project, announced its own departure. Maintainer Rodrigo Arias Mallo's list of grievances barely overlapped with Kelley's: GitHub's interface "barely works without JavaScript," which matters for a project whose whole premise is a browser that doesn't require much of it; the platform is "controlled by a single entity which can unilaterally ban our repository or account"; and it has gotten "more and more slow over time." Dillo did not simply relocate to Codeberg. It moved to a self-hosted git server at git.dillo-browser.org, keeping Codeberg and SourceHut only as mirrors. [4]

AI is one item on that list, not the headline. Arias Mallo wrote that GitHub "seem[s] to follow the current trend of over-focusing on LLMs and generative AI, which are destroying the open web (or what remains of it)," pointing to how sites erect JavaScript walls and browser fingerprinting against AI crawlers, defenses that also lock out a minimal browser like Dillo. That is a complaint about the AI industry's effect on the wider web, distinct from Zig's complaint about Actions reliability and Copilot-era product priorities specifically. [4]

Atlas interpretation: The two departures landing in the same week made for an easy composite headline, but they describe different failures. Zig's foundation enforces a no-LLM-generated-contributions policy and says GitHub's own AI push degraded a service the project depended on directly. Dillo's objection is closer to secondhand damage: an internet reshaping itself around AI crawlers and JavaScript-heavy defenses, with GitHub cited as a symptom of that shift rather than its direct source. Treating the two as one coordinated protest overstates how aligned the complaints actually are. [4][1]

What Zig gave up

The move was not costless. GitHub Sponsors was, in the foundation's own account, its single largest income source in 2024, bringing in more than $170,000. Kelley called that revenue stream "a liability" now, citing the departure of Devon Zuegel, the product's original lead, and is directing supporters to move recurring donations to Every.org, a nonprofit donation platform, instead. [6][1]

Atlas interpretation: GitHub did not comment when The Register asked about the departure, and nothing in the public record disputes the safe_sleep.sh timeline or the "vibe-scheduling" characterization. That is not confirmation the framing is correct, only that it went unanswered in the immediate aftermath; a company declining to comment on one open-source foundation's exit is unremarkable on its own. [3]

One story in a noisy year

Atlas interpretation: Zig's complaint sits inside a year of other, differently shaped friction between open-source infrastructure and the AI industry. In March 2025, SourceHut founder Drew DeVault wrote that he was spending "anywhere from 20-100%" of his working hours in a given week fighting off LLM crawlers hammering his git-hosting service from tens of thousands of residential IP addresses, producing what he described as dozens of brief outages a week and delaying high-priority work for months. That is a resourcing and abuse problem inflicted by AI companies' scrapers, not a complaint about a host forcing AI features on its users, but it is further evidence that 2025 was a year AI-related strain showed up repeatedly in open-source infrastructure, and not in just one shape. [7]

Atlas interpretation: What Zig, Dillo, and SourceHut actually share is timing and a target, not a single grievance. A CI system nobody could reason about, a browser locked out by JavaScript walls, and a git host absorbing LLM crawlers' costs in server time are three separate failures that each happened to implicate the AI industry's 2025 buildout. Calling that a unified developer "movement against AI" claims more coordination than the sources show; calling it coincidence undersells how often that year's AI push turned up as the proximate cause of unrelated infrastructure complaints. [1][4][7]