Slow tools are infuriating
Posted on 2025-08-17
At pretty much every job I've ever held, I've had to use at least one Atlassian tool. In every case, I've used Jira. In some cases, I've used Confluence. In all cases, these tools were abysmal and shockingly slow. I've been in pretty much constant employment for the last 9 years, and things have only got worse. Confluence is particularly heinous, requiring multiple seconds to load what should realistically be nothing more than text.
The latest casualty is GitHub. I've used GitHub for open source contrubutions for years, alongside Gitlab. Gitlab was always a much heavier beast, but it had its appeal for open source. GitHub managed, despite its sale to Microsoft, to remain a solid platform for collaboration and a fantastic example of a fairly lightweight tool for project management. I often pointed out with no small amount of frustration that we could achieve pretty much everything we needed with GitHub, and it would be much quicker to use than Jira. Alas, this is no longer the case.
When I load GitHub, I get a loading screen while Octocat™️ runs off to find useless updates about things I don't care about. This takes a few seconds, and while I can navigate away without issue it seems incredibly wasteful. I now just update my settings so it doesn't fetch anything, but why would this be the default for a landing page?
Every pull request is a nightmare if you've changed more than a few lines of code at a time. The interface is sluggish, searching is nearly impossible, and even interactions I used to like such as higlighting and suggesting changes feels like it's become much worse. I don't have any stats to back this up, but the whole site just feels like it's tacking on useless things and refactoring working interfaces for... some reason.
Recently, GitHub announced that the project would be moved into Microsoft's CoreAI team. This bodes poorly. Generative AI is already a technology that seems to be fixed on making software (both the writing and the use of) much, much worse. Having a team whose only goal is the furtherance of this unproven, hold-wrongable, environmentally damning technology in charge of the single largest repository of software should be a cause for revulsion. Software developers should look at this enshittified pile, gaze out to the horizon and shout "fuck that" before looting their IP from the corpse of the Octocat for safe-keeping.
The saddening thing is that GitHub was something of the last remaining peg of sanity I had in my working life. Everything else is shit: Slack, Jira, Confluence, Figma, Google Office. They're slow, clunky, unreliable behemoths of VC/monopoly-backed bollocks that actively fight me in my day-to-day work. One day, I'm going to actually sit down and work out how much time I lose in a working day due to the appalling load times and clear lack of care for UX design each tools brings. Jira moves the most essential button in the entire product to a completely arbitrary location? I lose seconds every time I want to open an issue. GitHub decides today that it's going to change how search works to help LLMs summarize things with 0.1% fewer hallucinations? More seconds gone. Slack exists? Days wasted.
I feel like the entire software industry is actively trying to radicalize me. I'm sitting here typing this on the single most powerful computer I've ever owned, yet I spend more time waiting for things to load and layouts to shift than I have done since 2005. It's a ludicrous pattern that I'm sure is almost entirely caused by morons in suits demanding product managers find new and interesting ways to monetize toilet rolls. I'm just so fucking tired of having to work in an industry where people (who should know better) have allowed this sort of thing to become the norm and even ridiculed anyone who suggests otherwise.
To the developers out there, I know it's not your fault or your decision but PLEASE fix your shit. If your website or web app takes more than a few milliseconds to load a basic page of text on a decently fast connection, you need to take it apart and work out what on God's green earth has happened. There is no good goddamn excuse for any of this.
To the business owners and decision makers out there: if you're examining tools and you notice that a venture capital firm is attached to any of them, discard them immediately. Venture capital is the single most damaging force in the software world, and leads software developers to do terrible things to their code to try and wrangle some fatcat their desired "exit". It's never good for you, it's always going to cost more, and you will be left holding the bag.
I highly recommend people try starting with email first for most things. You really can do nearly everything with it, using tools of your own choosing. It's fast, it's incredibly cheap, it's portable, and it's an open standard backed by decades of solid engineering. Don't add anything to your tech stack until you need to, and when you do you'd better make damn sure it's fast and free of dirty money.