In April 2026, Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder of HashiCorp) moved his terminal project, Ghostty, off GitHub. He’d been on the platform for roughly eighteen years. His parting verdict was that GitHub had become “no longer a place for serious work.” He isn’t alone, and he isn’t a crank. A lot of people are mad at GitHub right now, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment. But, of all the services you could be locked into, GItHub should be one of the easiest to walk away from. Your code is just files, and as it happens, files that already live on your own computer. So with all that fury, and an open door, you’d expect an exodus. There isn’t one. People are furious, but they are staying. That contradiction has a one-word explanation. When you follow that word, it explains almost everything that’s strange about GitHub today — why it keeps breaking, why people can’t leave, and how it actually makes money. Related This is why free apps don’t exist anymore Free apps used to be …