If you are using LLMs to interact with sites like GitLab and GitHub, and you have the option to use a GraphQL API, you should jump on it immediately.
GraphQL is absolutely terrible for human developers to interact with, but it's like Facebook could see into the future back in 2012. I cannot imagine a more perfect API surface for agents. With the REST API on GitHub, you can consume maybe 10 issue JSON blobs before your context window is blown out. With GraphQL constraining the results you can easily read hundreds in the same token budget.
Additionally, the # of requests your agents need to make can be reduced in many cases since GraphQL can join across types whereas REST APIs cannot. You essentially get savings in two dimensions here. Quota and raw token volume per logical response.
I work closely with the team responsible for a large, self-hosted GitHub Enterprise instance. This is good advice for clients/consumers of GH data, but it can very easily lead to a lot of strain on the server-side. It’s not obvious what fields that you request are simple reads from tables or actually end up invoking git under the hood.
You could argue the rate limit guards should better reflect that, but that’s just not the reality of the system. Likely speaks to a lot of stability issues GitHub has been facing lately.
My over-simplified explanation: the graphql server will map a field on a request to a resolver. The resolver can execute whatever code it needs to return the value, up to and including calls into libgit.
So asking for the title of a PR might just be an extra column selected on a DB query. But calculating mergability status of that PR might be something else entirely.
All of the queries my agents use select fields like issue title, body, labels, createdAt, updatedAt, etc. That's about it. I would hope that stuff is cached and efficient to read. I do not think GraphQL is a good way to interact with git. Running git on the CLI is the best way to interact with git.
Well 1. GitHub is the broken & bad one, and 2. isn't that kind of on them? If they're getting a ton of requests that read data awkwardly, the fix seems like the quintessential data engineering task.
It's definitely one source of GitHub's issues. They never implemented limits properly and their codebase is likely decades of cruft and impossible to retrofit quickly (to say nothing of their horrific mysql clusters). If you want to scale and survive it, you have to build the thing right the first time.
Although that may be true, the quota at least on GitHub depends on what you're quering. We worked directly with GitHub and a complex enough organisation hit with a GraphQL query can actually hit your hourly app limit before you even get a response.
As for GitLab, having hosted it for medium size organisations (~200 devs) and seeing how monorepo's work (they don't, we had GitLab's team show us that one page view made 50K db queries on our setup), please consult with your local admin team before firing GraphQL at it.
CLI still has the possibility of being a little more token efficient, at worst it may use graphql behind the scenes.
For our company, we advertise the graphql schema to bots and they can one-shot whatever task they're trying to do. I've found that it's so good that I cancelled building an an MCP server and any skill. Just a well documented GQL schema. It's pretty remarkable.
I think you might also have a GQL schema that's particularly well suited to what those bots need. Either that or your backend schema is relatively simple and the GQL schema covers all its possible data compositions.
no the advantage of graphql is that the caller can limit the response to only the information that they need. in a REST API the caller has to filter out the extraneous information. using LLMs to do the filtering uses up context window
Yea- its just a matter of whether the work is delegated to the client or offered by the server. Making sure what is served is in a really quality schema is generally the most efficient path- ime
Important buried context: 60/hour unauthenticated, but 5,000/hour on the free plan.
60/hour sucks. 5000/hour (a little more than one per second) is totally fine.
I'm chalking this up alongside Docker's decision to restrict unauthenticated pulls. Unauthenticated anything went the way of the dodo some time ago. If you want unauthenticated access, go run your own mirror.
Which is fine, and how these businesses should've been run from the start. Require auth, use the sign-in to increase conversion, that increases revenue, that revenue's used to increase capacity. When free plans become a drain on paid users' experience you're shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to support increasing free use you need to increase paid use. Do that later and the users revolt; do it early and it's normal.
Providing kickbacks to the repos being scraped would be a good way to help fund open source projects and pay creators like streaming services do. Seems like they're headed in this direction - it would be a massive product differentiator over GH
My first reaction was that I really like this idea.
If we had a system where people who access projects pay and popular FOSS developers get paid for it we'd have much better alignment.
My second thought was that bots would immediately try to circumvent such a plan. They'd probably spam Gitlab with fake repos to try to harvest those payouts.
The problem with this is that paying is a massive friction point to joining that many people, wisley or not, are much more averse to than a free (if toxic) option.
Normally, this is manageable, but for product categories with a huge network effect (like social media) this is a death knell unless you have the users of that product category already used to paying (Adobe's network effect driven business model comes to mind), and even then the switching friction is greater since that usually means many people paying for two systems for quite a long time, if not indefinitely.
> They'd probably spam Gitlab with fake repos to try to harvest those payouts.
Yeah I wonder if the math would shake out to make that make any sense. Each bot would require a paid subscription, so the only incentive for them to do this would be if there was some discoverability algorithm or SEO that that traffic helped push the content to real users
The guidance given seems to hurt open source projects, not help.
> Make the project private if the traffic is not coming from the audience you built it for, which stops anonymous callers reaching it at all. Or upgrade to Premium or Ultimate for much higher limits.
Three minutes after kickbacks were announced there would be a flurry of new repos being created with bots repeatedly scraping them just to get those kickbacks.
I put the text in to gptzero's AI checker and it came back with being Highly Confident it was 100% AI written. I don't think I've ever seen it that confident that the entire thing was AI before.
Dunno, for folks around here, Claude is important, Gitlab is important and banal press release is important. So all of them together makes it obviously important.
Hmm I don't know if they've updated it, but I'm not smelling any of the Claudisms I know so well. No convoluted sentences, metaphors, therapy-speak, 'it's not' constructions, "load bearing" etc etc.
It’s the structure that really gives this one away. If you were writing a blog post about introducing limits you wouldn’t explain what HTTP 429 is or what the behavior would be like. It’s a rate limit.
My FF being in French, I was automatically served a French version and I just couldn't understand what I was reading. Each sentence unclear, no link between sentences...
Average, yes, but the way they phrase it, it could be a token bucket or similar, where you can do 60 quick requests and then be blocked for a bit while the bucket refills
Making requests is inherently cheaper than delivering responses, even with caches. Efficiency improvements can buy a little time on a given resources but won't solve the problem of bot saturation now that everybody can spawn a custom bot in about 12 seconds and is being encouraged to do so.
Rate limits, blocking, and pay-per-use are the only roads out and even those might not last as models get better at hacking and masquerading.
The internet we want to use LLM's with is simply not one that can support LLM's, and with LLM's not going anywhere, the whole experience of the internet is going to be forced into some radically less open and more expensive paradigm.
Policies like this just represent the beginning of the transition.
We need a new non-commercial version of the internet. Free of bots, free of ads, ... you pay to access social media optimized to be interesting enough to be worth paying instead of addictive enough to keep you scrolling to show you more ads.
It may look impossible right now. But what is impossible for real is to continue as we are. The damage that internet does to society is increasing by the day while its value is reduced (economic value, social value).
> We need a new non-commercial version of the internet.
> you pay to access social media optimized to be interesting...
So is it commercial or non commercial?
Nothing is stopping you from creating a social network that is pay gated. Go build it. If you can't get anyone to sign up perhaps you'll realize it's not so easy as scapegoating addictive social media.
There is a whole cottage industry of people who legitimately make their living criticizing Facebook. It's a consumer software product. Yet few of these people seem to have their conviction extend to building an alternative that ever catches an audience. Why is that? Because addiction? Any other excuses?
It only proves your point because it wasn't successful in the end, but I really enjoyed the experience on app.net (a paid version of Twitter) while it still existed. Personally I think they lost it where a lot of these alternative platforms lose it - they try to build an ecosystem that is always coming soon and ends up scattered instead of focusing on one product
You'd need a force strong enough to prevent it from falling prey to this tragedy of the commons, and that force would need to be stronger than the incentives to commercialize it. And that's where plenty of contemporary scraping-based salaries lay.
That's this internet. Nothing precludes you from dropping big tech and solely engaging with the "indie web"[0][1] if you so choose. You're free to build your own website with its own RSS feed, join webrings[2] of like-minded people, and engage organically.
[0] One of many similar initiatives, I'm sure. Not an endorsement.
Careful what you wish for. The ticket to entry will (have to) be a proof of identity, the ultimate nail in the coffin of privacy and anonymity on the web.Outside of that, chaos.
I'm not so certain. I used to buy a broadsheet newspaper, which was full of ads. Now I pay a few hundred a year, and get the same newspaper online, with no ads at all.
So, the precursor to online media has already gone through this paradigm shift.
I mean, what you're saying is "If I pay for a product ads go away"
Which is partially true, but it only shifts the distribution of the problem. Once your service gains enough popularity network effects cause it to gain value. You have to worry about high priced buyouts of the entire service (great for the site owner, terrible for the users).
It's not, it just requires creativity. One example I can think of is limiting connectivity by distance between nodes. Something like Meshtastic seems unlikely to ever be commercialized in the same way that the Internet has been. Sure, you would lose some useful applications of the Internet, but you would gain other things.
I think it's because people are building agentic flows, reducing the amount of developer seats needed. It's the first step towards usage based pricing.
I would spend thousands of dollars for gitlab in terms of:
1) better UX for admin panel, I'm not sure what I've enabled and what not. Several buttons do not disable the rest of the settings, leaving me with some doubts (e.g. if I disabled grafana, why is there a setting that talks about where/how I store?)
2) a minimal version of gitlab without all the AI
Because that would go against MSFT's wishes on pushing LLM driven development if they started acknowledging that these tools are more damaging than helpful.
This is why I moved my code to self hosted forgejo instance. Private and guarded behind self hosted OIDC instance.
No more worrying about "rate limiting," subscription hell, or random extended outages (ie, github).
If LLM wants access, might implement payment layer and use 402 http status code and redirect them to payment page ;). Wonder how many people just give agents carte blanche physical (credit card) and virtual access
> You get 429 Too Many Requests with RateLimit-* headers and a Retry-After. Wait the interval it gives you, then retry.
Is there a test endpoint where one can validate the behavior of their ratelimit detection? Basically I do not want to cause excessive load on your servers just to test my implementation.
Getting that so I do not know exactly what they are doing. From the title I am guessing they are restricting or throttling if downloads exceeds some value.
I noticed that recently Github.com has some kind of weird bot detection on public repos. I have a browser extension for switching User Agents for a specific legacy site, sometimes i forget to turn it off and Github will require me to login to view public repos.
All of this is most likely due to mass scraping by LLMs. Welcome to the total shitification of the web.
The post is about gitlab but on the subject of GitHub, the rate limit I seem to have for viewing commit history seems to be 0 for logged out users and viewing source files seems to be about 5/hour.
GraphQL is absolutely terrible for human developers to interact with, but it's like Facebook could see into the future back in 2012. I cannot imagine a more perfect API surface for agents. With the REST API on GitHub, you can consume maybe 10 issue JSON blobs before your context window is blown out. With GraphQL constraining the results you can easily read hundreds in the same token budget.
Additionally, the # of requests your agents need to make can be reduced in many cases since GraphQL can join across types whereas REST APIs cannot. You essentially get savings in two dimensions here. Quota and raw token volume per logical response.
You could argue the rate limit guards should better reflect that, but that’s just not the reality of the system. Likely speaks to a lot of stability issues GitHub has been facing lately.
I'm not familiar with graphql but what would make something "invoke git", is it a technical thing or hyperbole?
So asking for the title of a PR might just be an extra column selected on a DB query. But calculating mergability status of that PR might be something else entirely.
As for GitLab, having hosted it for medium size organisations (~200 devs) and seeing how monorepo's work (they don't, we had GitLab's team show us that one page view made 50K db queries on our setup), please consult with your local admin team before firing GraphQL at it.
For our company, we advertise the graphql schema to bots and they can one-shot whatever task they're trying to do. I've found that it's so good that I cancelled building an an MCP server and any skill. Just a well documented GQL schema. It's pretty remarkable.
This gave me a chuckle, there's some subtle irony here- especially if the documentation of the GQL schema was work that needed to be done!
Most agents will use curl | jq to slice what they need (assuming a known API)
60/hour sucks. 5000/hour (a little more than one per second) is totally fine.
I'm chalking this up alongside Docker's decision to restrict unauthenticated pulls. Unauthenticated anything went the way of the dodo some time ago. If you want unauthenticated access, go run your own mirror.
If we had a system where people who access projects pay and popular FOSS developers get paid for it we'd have much better alignment.
My second thought was that bots would immediately try to circumvent such a plan. They'd probably spam Gitlab with fake repos to try to harvest those payouts.
Normally, this is manageable, but for product categories with a huge network effect (like social media) this is a death knell unless you have the users of that product category already used to paying (Adobe's network effect driven business model comes to mind), and even then the switching friction is greater since that usually means many people paying for two systems for quite a long time, if not indefinitely.
Yeah I wonder if the math would shake out to make that make any sense. Each bot would require a paid subscription, so the only incentive for them to do this would be if there was some discoverability algorithm or SEO that that traffic helped push the content to real users
The guidance given seems to hurt open source projects, not help.
> Make the project private if the traffic is not coming from the audience you built it for, which stops anonymous callers reaching it at all. Or upgrade to Premium or Ultimate for much higher limits.
One request per minute.
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab
Makes 12 graphql API calls and 2 /api/v4 calls... So you get like 4 pages per hour unauth?
Yes, you get 64 more bits to make whatever addresses you want, but the prefix is still your fingerprint.
Browsing open issues or reviewing a few PRs will easily use more than one request per minute.
The limits are based on the average user but I wonder if the most common interaction is to view a readme and bounce.
I don’t know that putting a paywall up to learn from or even consider contributing to public projects is a good thing.
Rate limits, blocking, and pay-per-use are the only roads out and even those might not last as models get better at hacking and masquerading.
The internet we want to use LLM's with is simply not one that can support LLM's, and with LLM's not going anywhere, the whole experience of the internet is going to be forced into some radically less open and more expensive paradigm.
Policies like this just represent the beginning of the transition.
Loading https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab is showing 14 API calls so presumably significantly more DB queries for a public page
It may look impossible right now. But what is impossible for real is to continue as we are. The damage that internet does to society is increasing by the day while its value is reduced (economic value, social value).
> you pay to access social media optimized to be interesting...
So is it commercial or non commercial?
Nothing is stopping you from creating a social network that is pay gated. Go build it. If you can't get anyone to sign up perhaps you'll realize it's not so easy as scapegoating addictive social media.
There is a whole cottage industry of people who legitimately make their living criticizing Facebook. It's a consumer software product. Yet few of these people seem to have their conviction extend to building an alternative that ever catches an audience. Why is that? Because addiction? Any other excuses?
Except it's non-commercial, therefore valuable, therefore commercialized, therefore commercial.
You'd need a force strong enough to prevent it from falling prey to this tragedy of the commons, and that force would need to be stronger than the incentives to commercialize it. And that's where plenty of contemporary scraping-based salaries lay.
[0] One of many similar initiatives, I'm sure. Not an endorsement.
[1] https://indieweb.org/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
Your human engagement will attract said predators because it's a unique information signal.
Gating everything behind paid (but with no ads) likely would hurt a significant amount of lower income users.
So, the precursor to online media has already gone through this paradigm shift.
Which is partially true, but it only shifts the distribution of the problem. Once your service gains enough popularity network effects cause it to gain value. You have to worry about high priced buyouts of the entire service (great for the site owner, terrible for the users).
I expect to not be the only one, it certainly drives usage KPIs up and lead to this kind of decisions.
Gitlab must pay a fortune to bot traffic, most of which is malicious or garbage at best.
No more worrying about "rate limiting," subscription hell, or random extended outages (ie, github).
If LLM wants access, might implement payment layer and use 402 http status code and redirect them to payment page ;). Wonder how many people just give agents carte blanche physical (credit card) and virtual access
Hopefully they find some kind of carve out for OSS projects while still blocking the egregious offenders.
Is there a test endpoint where one can validate the behavior of their ratelimit detection? Basically I do not want to cause excessive load on your servers just to test my implementation.
Getting that so I do not know exactly what they are doing. From the title I am guessing they are restricting or throttling if downloads exceeds some value.
All of this is most likely due to mass scraping by LLMs. Welcome to the total shitification of the web.