Show HN: Better Hub – A better GitHub experience

[bekacru]

Hey HN,

I’m Bereket, founder of Better Auth. Our team spends a huge amount of time on GitHub every day. Like anyone who’s spent enough time there, I’ve always wished for a much better GitHub experience.

I’ve asked a lot of people to do something about it, but it seems like no one is really tackling GitHub directly.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet from Mitchell (HashiCorp) complaining about the repo main page. That became the trigger. I decided to start hacking on a prototype to see how far I could push an alternative interface using GitHub’s APIs.

Within a week, I genuinely started using it as my default, same with the rest of our team. After fixing a few rough edges, I decided to put it out there.

A few things we’re trying to achieve:

- UI/UX rethink* – A redesigned repo home, PR review flow, and overview pages focused on signal over noise. Faster navigation and clearer structure.

- Keyboard-first workflow: ⌘K-driven command center, ⌘/ for global search, ⌘I opens “Ghost,” an AI assistant, and more.

- Better AI integration: Context-aware AI that understands the repo, the PR you’re viewing, and the diff you’re looking at.

- New concepts: Prompt Requests, self-healing CI, auto-merge with automatic conflict resolution, etc.

It’s a simple Next.js server talking to the GitHub API, with heavy caching and local state management.

We’re considering optional git hosting (in collaboration with teams building alternative backends), but for now, the experiment is: how much can we improve without replacing GitHub

This is ambitious and very early. The goal is to explore what a more modern code collaboration experience could look like, and make it something we can all collaborate on.

I’d love your feedback on what you think should be improved about GitHub overall.

[dkdbejwi383]

The website doesn't tell me what it does or why it's better. It just wants me to sign-up and provide a bunch of permissions without first selling itself to me.

The landing page should clearly communicate what this does and contrast it with GitHub to make it obvious how it's better.

I guess the little embedded video might show some of this but it's not very clear. I just see someone faffing about and scrolling up and down randomly.

[cpfohl]

Yeah…and I don’t burn my time watching videos unless it’s teaching me to fix an appliance, or do small home repairs…videos are for tricky in person stuff, screenshots and text are for apps.

[figmert]

> It just wants me to sign-up and provide a bunch of permissions without first selling itself to me.

Yes, and including admin access to all your orgs :)

[fabmilo]

indeed. make a loom showing us why is better.

[jayfx]

Came here to say exactly that

[jraph]

A better answer to GitHub being bad is probably fleeing GitHub, not working around some of the badness and creating even more dependence on it.

[sebmaynard]

On mobile (Firefox android) you can't see the video overview - so I have absolutely no information to go on as to what this is, other than it wants a lot of permissions, and to sign in with my GitHub account.

[faize]

Would love to give it a try by browsing public repos without the need to sign in and grant all those permissions

[bkolobara]

I just noticed that you can uncheck permissions before you clicking continue with GitHub, to reduce the scope.

[theturtletalks]

Here's the repo:

https://github.com/better-auth/better-hub

Looks interesting but also, they are saving everything to a database. It's not simply an alternative frontend for Github akin Nitter or NewPipe (for Twitter and TY respectively).

[egeres]

If it's an open source project the landing page should have a direct link to it so that developers can get a broader sense of what this product is

[nusl]

Why not allow it to be self-hosted or make it a browser extension? Seems cool but I am not gonna trust a random tool with this level of access.

[michidk]

Is there any reason you could not self-host it?

[bkolobara]

This looks awesome! I remember the Mitchell tweet, it was like a week ago? I'm super impressed how much functionality you managed to push out so fast. Crazy times.

And I very much agree with Mitchell that the repository page needs improvement. If it's a public repository I'm exploring, I scroll always down through the files to see the README. If it's a repository I'm maintaining I'm either clicking on commits, PRs or issues. All this information should be right there on the first page! Most of the realestate is occupied by the file view, something I never cared about.

I have also been working on improving the experience for myself with https://lubeno.dev, and have been thinking for the last year how GitHub can be improved. I started specifically with Pull Requests, borrowing some ideas from other platforms, like stacked PRs. One feature that I'm very proud of is the possibility to see an interdiff when someone changes the code I commented on. You can instantly tell if the issue was addressed instead of getting an <outdated> tag on the comment and hunting down the latest changes. Would really love to see more innovation when it comes to forges. It looks like GitHub set the standard 20 years ago and everything else is a 1:1 copy of it.

[dewey]

I'm not really interested in using it, or giving someone access to my GitHub account but I do hope that something like that will inspire someone at GitHub.

[alejoar]

Yeah I'm not giving you all those permissions. Make it more granular maybe?

[Jacques2Marais]

I think most of the permissions can be toggled?

[ayhanfuat]

"Click to toggle optional permissions. Hover the to learn why each is needed."

[ezekg]

I think you'd have a better reaction if you allowed some public repos to be viewed before handing over the keys to the castle, so to speak. Even better would be allowing a public repo to preview itself via better-hub.com/{org}/{repo} would be slick. Expensive for you, but might help onboarding. As it stands, the call to action is poor, so unfortunately there's no way I'm going to login with GitHub and give a bunch of permissions to a new app posted on HN, no matter who built it.

[monster_truck]

This is insanity, I'm not giving some random app these permissions

[pulkas]

your better make it as chrome extension.

And i dont know why you wanted me to give you all my permissions?

[ramon156]

Would love an ad-hoc alternative frontend similar to NewPipe for YouTube.

Would be cool if I could have the same interface as forgejo/codeberg and just pretend its not GH

[alex_suzuki]

Congrats on the launch!

Personally I don’t see the appeal of tacking on to a dependency that I’d prefer to get rid of.

[nik736]

No lightmode?

[robtherobber]

I will never use dark mode if I can avoid it. The idea that it's somehow better is a bit shady [0][1] (save for mobile devices where arguably it may help save some energy), but I absolutely understand that it can be a personal preference.

Multiple discussions already exist on HN on this topic, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664079

[0] https://simplyexplained.com/videos/why-dark-mode-makes-you-s...

[1] https://www.lloydatkinson.net/posts/2024/the-dark-mode-lobby...

[bekacru]

There is light mode and you can change themes with cmdk + change theme

[kjksf]

There is one: click top right icon for menu, "Light mode".

It does tend to lose it on refresh, which is bad.

[junon]

Yeah I'm a darkmode fan but this is nearly unreadable in the sun

[esskay]

Having a vibe coded app (openclaw) being in the header promo image was enough to nope me out of even thinking about it. This is vibe coded slop. Why on earth would I give that access to my github account.

[TheDong]

Yeah, I had to switch dictionaries once I found Webster's url: https://www.merriam-webster.com/

[junon]

What a weird thing to get hung up on.

[bregma]

It's a minus sign not a dash. You're just focusing on the negative.

[avocadosword]

I think that Better Auth (www.better-auth.com) might have been an inspiration for the name here

[tonytamps]

if this is your evaluation criteria for products I wish you the best.

[randomtoast]

But it is not an em dash.