I cannot imagine what would be working as a designer at GitHub look like. I don’t have the talents to be a designer of course and my mind thinks more in abstract concepts and ideas (hence why I’m a physicist). But I still can see the dark and stupid design choices that are made. I usually ignore them and move on specially that GitHub is providing great value for me. But last week, GitHub pushed a design change in their UI that made me angry.
Welcome to the new GitHub repository Agents tab experience!
Someone decided that the new Agents tab should be in the middle to the left of one of the most used button “Actions”. And if you have a small screen, it will be even more annoying. I have clicked on Agents tab many times by mistake thinking it’s the Actions tab. Why? because my brain is trained to look to Actions, this things starting with letter “A” and don’t think twice. This has been drilled into my head for years.
But more important question is not only about the placement of the tab, but also about why the hell it is included at all in the first place. I just used github.com LLM agent once, and it was on different repository. But this is now included in every repository, which is unnecessary and annoying.
So I discovered that someone (maybe same person) decided that the while giving the users the ability to disable it, they should still include it by default in every repository. If you want to restrict it to specific repositories or choose not to use it at all, you can do so in the settings. But why force it on everyone by default?
Ok if you are like me and got this little annoyed thing, you can disable it in the repository settings:
Go to account settings → click on GitHub Copilot → Then choose GitHub Agent → choose repository access level (default is “All repositories”)
Per GitHub announcement, this will take into consideration if your account (organization user) have active GitHub Copilot subscription or not. So thankfully not all people have to suffer from this annoyance by default.
I’m not sure what is the direction of GitHub with this kind of design choices. There are many complains from users about the new design and changes of github.com and how it is laggy and slow. It feels like they are trying to push their AI products on everyone, even if it is not needed or wanted.
To be clear, I use LLM and GitHub Copilot daily, but I don’t need it to be forced on me in every repository and everywhere in my face. I have specific use cases where I need it, and I can enable it when I need it. I hope that someone sane enough will step in and fix this mess soon, or I hope soon. Or maybe I just need to ask GitHub Copilot to write a userscript that hides the Agents tab and all other AI related stuff on github.com in ironic sense.
Regarding my view on this design choice, a comment in the announcment discussion said it all: “Right next to Actions is the work of the devil himself (we don’t have discussions enabled)”. I find this comment very accurate and hilarious, so maybe it is just a soul of devil that got into GitHub’s design team and we just need to pray for them to get out.