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GitHub is having trouble counting things

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Why This Matters

This story highlights minor but telling UI bugs on GitHub, a platform millions of developers rely on daily, suggesting quality control or engineering resourcing issues at a critical piece of developer infrastructure. While not catastrophic, such glitches erode trust in tools that teams depend on for accurate collaboration data and workflows.

Key Takeaways

In the past week, I’ve noticed two pretty severe UI bugs in GitHub. The first is an overcounting of PRs in the tab on a repository, this is particularly common after you merge a PR, but it’s not the only trigger of this behavior. To add insult to injury, the right count is even right there on this page.

The second occurred while I was trying to set up Sentry. I’ve been using GitHub for 11 years now, so I have collected three pages of org memberships. Unfortunately for me, the project I’m setting up Sentry for is on the second page.

For some reason, Chrome doesn’t let you modify the address in the bar for these pop-up windows. Luckily, you can force navigate using JavaScript.

Really curious as to what’s going on over there, if you’ve got any insight let me know!