Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing(about.gitlab.com) |
Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing(about.gitlab.com) |
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?
That's why GitHub assigns "points" to each requests and deducts based on the data shape you request. For simple requests it's 1-to-1, but can quickly balloon
This is a solved problem. They just dump it into a file and `jq` or `rg` to find the stuff they need.
Agents are smarter than you think. They've been hill-climbing for generations in their RL environments.
The ones that get their context window blown out don't survive to launch
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most agents will use curl | jq to slice what they need (assuming a known API)
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.
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.
Loading https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab is showing 14 API calls so presumably significantly more DB queries for a public page
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).
> What happens on October 19
> If you're close to a limit
> What changes and what doesn't
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!