Exponential Growth Meets GitHub Limits
Key Points
- GitHub abruptly disabled lovable.dev’s ability to create repositories, sparking a multi‑hour outage that exposed the startup’s heavy reliance on the platform.
- Lovable.dev was generating new GitHub repos at an extreme rate—about one every two seconds—yet GitHub had previously assured them they would not hit quotas or rate limits.
- The shutdown was triggered by a terms‑of‑service violation that occurred during the early‑January holiday lull, when GitHub’s on‑call staff were effectively unavailable.
- In response, the team scrambled to implement a workaround using Amazon S3, highlighting the fragility of building critical infrastructure atop a single third‑party service.
- The incident underscores a looming 2025 challenge: rapidly expanding AI‑driven development tools will strain existing platforms like GitHub, forcing providers to diversify away from the GitHub “flywheel.”
Full Transcript
# Exponential Growth Meets GitHub Limits **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVTJUykc6B0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVTJUykc6B0) **Duration:** 00:05:40 ## Summary - GitHub abruptly disabled lovable.dev’s ability to create repositories, sparking a multi‑hour outage that exposed the startup’s heavy reliance on the platform. - Lovable.dev was generating new GitHub repos at an extreme rate—about one every two seconds—yet GitHub had previously assured them they would not hit quotas or rate limits. - The shutdown was triggered by a terms‑of‑service violation that occurred during the early‑January holiday lull, when GitHub’s on‑call staff were effectively unavailable. - In response, the team scrambled to implement a workaround using Amazon S3, highlighting the fragility of building critical infrastructure atop a single third‑party service. - The incident underscores a looming 2025 challenge: rapidly expanding AI‑driven development tools will strain existing platforms like GitHub, forcing providers to diversify away from the GitHub “flywheel.” ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVTJUykc6B0&t=0s) **GitHub Takedown Sparks Major Outage** - A rapid‑scaling project (“lovable.dev”) was abruptly disabled by GitHub due to a terms‑of‑service breach, causing a cascading outage and highlighting how unchecked exponential growth could worsen similar incidents by 2025. ## Full Transcript
GitHub took down lovable. deev today and
I want to talk about it because at the
end of the day we are in a situation
where that kind of thing is going to get
much much worse in 2025 I'll explain the
competing exponential growth curves that
we're on here and how this all broke
down so overnight in the US lovable.
deev suddenly was unable to continue to
create GitHub repos and this quickly
snowballed into a major outage because
at the end of the day their exponential
growth has been so fast lovable. devs
has that they were creating GitHub repos
at the rate of one every two seconds
absolutely insane speed and they said
that they had previously checked before
the holidays with GitHub and said look
we're growing we are growing really fast
we're depending on GitHub to be up are
you good are we going to hit quotas or
rate limits and GitHub told them
no well no one is quite s saying what
happened I've dug in GitHub won't say
lovables being polite about it all that
is actually occurring is that there's a
terms of service violation that lovable
ran into sometime during the night hours
on January 2nd in the US GitHub was all
asleep and it's the holiday so like
you're really waking up a developer
who's somewhere skiing at this point and
no one was on call really and certainly
they weren't responsive because love was
hard down for hours overnight a major
client of theirs hard down for hours
they said they tried and tried and tried
to wake up lovable and got nobody they
tried to build a workaround on Amazon S3
during the night to keep people up
because it's they're a European startup
it's like the first working day of the
year in Europe and people are like
coming in with their New Year's
resolutions and they want to build stuff
and it's hard down so they're
desperately scrambling to get stuff over
to S3 building a workaround and it's
like you can read on X the different
sort of updates that come through and
it's always like more bad news coming
through until they finally got GitHub to
wake up this morning and GitHub took
them back out of jail and allowed them
to start creating repositories again now
reading between the lines I strongly
suspect that one of the takeaways for
lovable on this is they can't be that
dependent on GitHub and so they probably
will eventually move to Amazon S3 as a
way to start to scale this which is not
exactly ideal because one of the things
that's really nice about GitHub is
everyone knows what it is everyone goes
over to GitHub and knows what you've
done and there's just not a good
substitute for that social quality that
GitHub brings to code and so it's sort
of sad to see a situation where you have
an AI tool trying to build on top of
GitHub trying to reinforce the GitHub
flywheel and GitHub just isn't set up
for the volume and this is something
that I want to call out because I think
there's two exponential curves that are
happening in 2025 that are stacking each
other and they are going to make life
even worse for providers like GitHub if
you are in the infro business that has
anything to do with uh Dev building at
all brace yourself do an architectural
refactor now and the reason why is
because over the last 20 years your
entire business model has been Engineers
committing Cod at the speed that humans
can write code not anymore now in 2024
you've had like a massive 10x explosion
in the number of people who are
interested in coding because they can
code with llms and so there's a bunch of
AI driven code being committed to
repositories like
GitHub and that's about to get even
worse because now stack on top of that
sort of massive explosion in humans
using AI to code now agent will be using
AI to code because we're going to have
autonomous agents coding within the next
couple months here so now like 10x to
10x and you're going to get even more
code being committed look I am not
saying that this is all high quality
code we're not talking about that here
we're just saying that from a sheer
volume perspective if you are in Tech
you should be doing a refactor now you
should be looking at your architecture
and looking at the ways people use your
systems and ask yourself if these people
suddenly get access to AI tooling that
enables them to be much more productive
how will their usage of my system change
how will it
change let me give you an example that's
not even GitHub let's just say you're
running a nice little SAS business for
marketers let's say your marketer
suddenly gets a hold of project Mariner
it gets a hold of a browser that's
agentic right and they're like oh thank
God I don't have to go and get the
freaking uh report downloaded off of off
of this tool I can just go and have the
agent do it for me every morning and
then now they feel free so they're going
to code up five or six different agents
give them different tasks they're going
to be all over your system they will be
using this person's login with or
without your knowledge and suddenly your
usage patterns are going to completely
change and that's a light version of
what could happen imagine the
consequences for like security and oth
so we have a lot to work on when it
comes to agentic and I think the GitHub
example is an early 2025 warning of how
bad it could get if we are not careful
so I'm glad lovable is back up but
unfortunately because of the
fundamentals in the space right now I
expect more of this to happen in the
coming year