How GitHub and Codeberg Threw Wrenches in My Works—And Why It Made Mustela Bulletproof

May 6, 2026 – I’ve just finalized the stable version of Mustela, 1.0.0-stable. The last major hurdle was automated robots.txt generation. I had to develop an intelligent mode-switching system to ensure web indexing remains both secure and automated for the user. But I don't want to get into the weeds of that today. Today, I want to talk about how GitHub surprised me and how being "pushed out" of the system forced me to find a far superior solution.

The Irony of GitHub

GitHub used to be my primary versioning stack. I used it for everything—until it started throwing wrenches in my works. I received an email that essentially gave me an ultimatum: enable two-factor authentication (2FA), or you're out.

"We're reaching out to let you know that... we have officially begun requiring users... to have 2FA enabled... After this date, your access to GitHub.com will be limited."

What an irony. I created Mustela with an emphasis on autonomy and truth in creation, yet GitHub tells me that if I want to create, I have to dance to their tune. On top of that, I realized that even with private repositories, there is a significant risk that my code is being harvested as fodder for their AI models. At that moment, I told myself: Enough. As a creator, I am done with GitHub.

Escaping to Codeberg and Hitting the Wall (Error 429)

I migrated to Codeberg. Everything looked great at first—repositories, organizations, a much freer atmosphere. But then came another wrench. While fine-tuning Mustela’s preset downloads (templates for Vite, Bun, etc.) via their API, I hit a wall. After a few attempts, the system blocked me with an HTTP 429: Too Many Requests error.

I broke into a cold sweat. If Mustela started gaining traction and multiple people tried to download templates at once, the whole system would collapse. I briefly considered hard-coding the templates directly into the Mustela binary as "closed" assets, but that would have killed the vision of a lightweight, modular tool.

Jackpot: Vercel as a Lightning-Fast CDN

Then, a stroke of genius. Mustela’s documentation is hosted on Vercel. What if I just uploaded the template ZIP files there? I tried "pinging" the server and analyzed the returned header:

HTTP/2 200 
accept-ranges: bytes
cache-control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate
content-disposition: inline; filename="vite.zip"
content-type: application/zip
x-vercel-cache: HIT
etag: "714235102a59b8d1a2ba50b32ad7b03b"
content-length: 6854

The result absolutely floored me.

1. x-vercel-cache: HIT – This means the file isn't being pulled from a disk; it's being served to the user directly from the server's RAM.
2. etag – A unique digital fingerprint of the file that I can use within Mustela for lightning-fast version checks without unnecessary downloads.

The Victory of Independence

I realized I had hit the jackpot. Mustela is already incredibly fast thanks to Vlang, and in combination with Vercel’s Edge CDN serving data directly from memory, it’s an unbeatable combo. My registries now respond instantly, without lag, and without the arbitrary limits of version control platforms.

I modified the registry module, redirected the downloads to our own CDN, and everything is running like clockwork. Vercel saved my skin and, paradoxically, liberated me from the cumbersome APIs of giant versioning portals.

I want to thank GitHub and Codeberg for throwing those wrenches in my works. If they hadn't, I would never have discovered this elegant, high-performance solution.

Mustela is free now. And it’s faster than ever.