GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes

wwhtsky about 6 hours ago 82 commentsRead Article on github.blog

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68% Positive

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Discussion (82 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

1qaboutecs•about 2 hours ago

scary but thank goodness github actions is highly reliable, robust to change, and has a simple-to-understand ontology.

paulddraper•about 2 hours ago

To the naysayers, I would point out that actions has not only one but TWO 9s of uptime. [1]

[1] https://www.githubstatus.com/

simoesd•about 2 hours ago

Github has recently changed the way their status page tracks uptime in the name of "transparency"[0]. "Partial Outages" are now only worth 30% of their duration, and "Degraded Performance" is worth none, so their uptime values are now wildly inflated.

[0] https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/bringing-more...

PunchyHamster•about 1 hour ago

Sometimes both nines are even in the front!

nimbius•about 1 hour ago

Cursed by mighty Redmond to roam the market wasteland until death, one of the seventy some odd beleaguered CoPilot products is now being lashed like a haggard burro to the dying light of a once prominent development platform that, upon itself, were pinned the hopes and dreams of a commercial software juggernaut to capture the hearts and minds of developers all around the world.

infecto•about 2 hours ago

For all the hate it gets, I use them regularly with little to no complaints.

I have always found it as a pretty nice to have feature if I am already using GitHub. It’s far from perfect or robust but I can get a lot of use out of it with low to no friction.

maccard•about 2 hours ago

We had more build failures in 2025 due to Actions outages or degraded service than any other reason.

tom1337•about 1 hour ago

And now it has an outage https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/dbypmw7h77l5

Frieren•about 1 hour ago

As financial markets get tighter AI companies will stop subsidizing their services and charge enough money to actually make a profit.

It is time to setup local models. It is cheaper, and you already have a computer. Why keep it idle and pay someone else for their CPU?

tempaccount5050•about 1 hour ago

Because it doesn't even come close to frontier models in intelligence/speed/price. I can run my 3090 nonstop and rack up an electricity bill that costs more than a subscription and get worse results that are slower. They are ok for simple/non complex things, but that's not really what I need AI for.

Hendrikto•25 minutes ago

Well, it is currently cheaper because it is massively subsidized. That will change when subsidies stop. I don’t think it is a good argument.

datsci_est_2015•about 1 hour ago

I feel the opposite. I do need AI for simple things. Complex things are usually so ill-defined that the actual bottleneck takes place in meatspace, not in my IDE.

cultofmetatron•20 minutes ago

if only there was a place that was naturally cold to take advantage of airflow for cooling and cheap renewable electricity thats always on...

yeswecatan•about 1 hour ago

I assume because local models are nowhere near as good. Hoping I’m wrong!

datsci_est_2015•about 1 hour ago

The better your code is architected, the less powerful model you’ll need for it to make sense of it.

E.g. a well-designed deployment (infrastructure-as-code) repository doesn’t need a frontier model to be understood well-enough to create a new job / service using sibling jobs / services as templates.

And this already saves me dozens of minutes per week, although it’s not a 2x multiplier in my efficiency.

varispeed•about 1 hour ago

The issue is that local models are dumb and tend to make mistakes than look good at a first glance. So any "saving" is quickly ruined by having to do an extensive review. You might as well just write things yourself.

varispeed•about 1 hour ago

Local models are nowhere near the performance of frontier models. Unless you can fork out like £100k to get something passable in terms of performance.

TacticalCoder•about 1 hour ago

> As financial markets get tighter ...

They never really get tight very long: the various states are way too busy flooding the world with endless money printing to kick the can of the public debt always further.

Covid financial crash? We went to new highs. 2022 tech flash crash (Meta and Netflix did -75% for example): we then went to new highs.

The only way for governments who ever spend way more than they bring in taxpayer dollars is to de-valuate the currency.

So "financial markets getting tighter": probably won't last.

Hendrikto•21 minutes ago

As you said yourself: Quantitative easing did not solve anything. We keep kicking the can down the road, and the problems grow exponentially every time. This approach won’t work forever. In fact, we may be past the tipping point already.

dotdi•about 2 hours ago

I feel the rug under my feet moving. Is it being pulled?!

2ndorderthought•about 2 hours ago

Just you wait, this is a gentle tug to test how hard they can pull when the time comes.

xienze•about 2 hours ago

It's gonna be interesting to see how this plays out. Usually a tech rugpull like this lasts a number of years. And this sort of has, but the agentic stuff has really only caught on like wildfire in the last, I dunno, six months or so. The rugpull would be way more effective if there could be several years of getting developers addicted to this development paradigm, but alas, the VC money burned was too great to subsidize for very long.

swiftcoder•about 1 hour ago

Its also a weird way to cede control of the market to the foreign model vendors, because I'm reasonably sure that DeepSeek et al aren't subsidising tokens to the same extent that the big 3's subscription models have been.

eastbound•about 2 hours ago

If that is true, we’ve discovered that offering a product for $1 the $17, yields to dramatically shorter runway but possibly more addicted users. Can’t wait for products offered at $1 the $100.

awakeasleep•about 2 hours ago

I wonder if it has anything to do with the war in the Middle East forcing gulf states to scale back investment

boesboes•about 1 hour ago

Not yet... I calculated they under charge by 50-90X soooo

tuo-lei•35 minutes ago

is there any data on how many Actions minutes a single copilot review actually takes? the announcement doesn't mention it, and for a team doing 20+ PRs a day that number adds up fast.

silverwind•about 2 hours ago

This seems nonsensical. Why would non-actions activity consume actions budget?

semiquaver•about 1 hour ago

  > Last month, we shared how GitHub Copilot code review runs on […] GitHub Actions using GitHub-hosted runners.

They say that they’re now billing against their actual costs

horsawlarway•about 1 hour ago

My guess is that they're moving to a spot where they can pitch an LLM "doing something" as an action, and copilot is their first move. I don't see it as crazy to think of a "copilot code review" in a similar way to other build actions.

But also - enterprise accounts already have budget assigned to github actions, and this allows them to start billing right away without having to actually get (or allow) businesses to evaluate the return of having copilot do code reviews.

So seems like it's a mix of immediate incentives and long term architecture. I don't like it, though. If I were an enterprise my first response would be to turn it off.

swiftcoder•about 1 hour ago

> enterprise accounts already have budget assigned to github actions, and this allows them to start billing right away without having to actually get (or allow) businesses to evaluate the return of having copilot do code reviews

Hang on, I read this as copilot reviews with bill both actions minutes and AI credits. Did I miss something?

zdragnar•about 1 hour ago

I'm assuming the running of the model is consuming the tokens, and the client coordinating and orchestrating the calls to the model to perform the review is happening in an action runner, thus using action minutes.

freedomben•about 2 hours ago

Agreed, especially weird since they just rolled out usage-based billing for Co-pilot. It would make a lot more sense to just re-use that usage instead IMHO

semiquaver•about 1 hour ago

It does, read the article. This feature now consumes actions credits and AI credits.

freedomben•about 1 hour ago

Yeah my mistake, I wasn't very clear in my comment.

Though actually the more I think about it, I think this change actually does make more sense. In the case of the AI running on GitHub side, that does feel pretty equivalent to CI minutes. I would hope that the number of minutes they bill for is pretty minimal though, since the vast majority of that will be I/O waiting on the agent to return

whalesalad•about 1 hour ago

Code review ostensibly takes place inside a container runtime just like tests or other actions would. It makes sense to me.

PunchyHamster•about 1 hour ago

but consumes vastly more resources than most app's build process.

Done that way it obfuscates cost of the code review and I think that's on purpose

whalesalad•about 1 hour ago

The cost of running a container (to github) is someone else not being able to run a container.

throwatdem12311•about 2 hours ago

“F*ck you. Pay me.”

That’s why.

semiquaver•about 2 hours ago

Good thing GitHub has plenty of built-up goodwill to spend down. If they didn’t this cascade of (probably necessary but nevertheless negative for customers) changes might be the tipping point to push a lot of companies to seek other options.

ryukoposting•about 1 hour ago

> Good thing GitHub has plenty of built-up goodwill to spend down

Do they, though? I don't know a single person who uses GitHub who actually likes it. It's far more often something like "it's fine, but I miss (GitLab|Gerrit)" or "I stopped using it for personal stuff and moved to (Codeberg|GitLab)."

The brand recognition among non-technical folks is really the strongest selling point in my eyes. And that's irrelevant to ~95% of software development.

alex_suzuki•about 1 hour ago

GitLab is getting ensh*ttified as well. Rarely a day passes when they’re not trying to somehow push their AI features on me, even though I never asked for it. Thinking about moving to managed Forgejo.

semiquaver•about 1 hour ago

The tell-tale just lit up on your sarcasm detector, better get it serviced.

infecto•about 1 hour ago

Unclear why this is so shocking. Sounds like they have been making migrations on their underlying systems and this better aligns with the cost to run. I would be curious how many are using their code review system.

mhitza•about 2 hours ago

Interesting, I didn't know minutes where free before.

Stopped my recurring subscription at the end of last year when it started spinning up actions for review. Which as a side effect doubled the time (or so) to do a review. Whereas before that I would open a PR, wait at most a minute or two and the review was already done.

aleksiy123•about 1 hour ago

Anyone have good alternatives for ci/cd on the cheap for a solo dev?

I’m blowing through my 1000 mins in days.

Thinking to either pool some free tiers or figure something out with spot instances.

Also is it just me or is CI/CD tooling still sort of rough all around.

Atotalnoob•about 1 hour ago

Your best bet is to self host woodpecker CI.

Hetzner has cheap VPS that I host my CI on. It costs like $10/month.

Pick the cheapest region, since CI runners location doesn’t matter much.

aleksiy123•31 minutes ago

Yeah, I did hertzner runner for a bit.

But I think the issue is that my situation (solo dev, mono repo) is just not right for a dedicated instance.

With only 1-2 runners, the pipeline is slow (low parallelism) and resource constrained. And at least 50% of the time its idle (I'm not working/sleeping).

I guess what I'm really looking for is for some kind of aggressive autoscaling, and aggressive caching.

I tried a couple of things (GHA, Dagger + Hertzner, Buildkite)

And Im just not too sure theres going to be any out of the box solution since my priority is essentially to minimize cost and maximize efficiency. Not really a great customer for any providers.

Im tempted to just get agent to build something out quickly with cloudflare workers + spot instances.

I also have some other nice to have requirements:

- ts/code over config

- locally runnable and testable

- preferably no lock in

- repeatable/reproducible

isoprophlex•9 minutes ago

Ephemeral, beefy fly.io instances?

sowbug•23 minutes ago

I have Gitea and Gitea Runner apps running on TrueNAS on an extra mini PC in a closet. Works better than GitHub for me.

horsawlarway•about 1 hour ago

I self-host Drone CI still. I think Harness is in the slow process of letting it rot (it still gets at least some updates, though), which is kind of a shame, but it still does just fine for my CI needs (solo usage as well).

https://docs.drone.io/server/provider/github/

Very easy to stand up, does just fine. Definitely doesn't have the "library" of prebuilt actions that GHA does, but for the most part... I consider that a plus.

Otherwise it's very similar in concept - define actions in a yaml file, run commands on an image, webhook integration with most repo providers.

I run it on some old hardware locally (k3s cluster on old machines) and it outperforms the 1000 minutes from GHA easily, and costs basically nothing but some maintenance and time.

I've been keeping my eyes open for something new in this space since Harness bought it, though - so if other folks have recommendations I'd be interested in alternatives.

theSage•about 1 hour ago

We use jayporeci.in and have never hit capacity problems since we can choose to run it in laptops / servers / spare VMs etc.

Best decision we ever made

KeyBoardG•44 minutes ago

There is a free tier for on-prem TeamCity.

funkypants•about 1 hour ago

Host your own GitLab runner?

AlexandrB•about 2 hours ago

Expect to see more of these kinds of announcements as companies need to start showing returns on their AI investments. It's hard to say how subsidized the current AI products are[1] but we're definitely getting a free lunch at VC's expense the moment.

[1] Ed Zitron speculates the actual prices with token based billing for heavy users will be something like 10x the subscription price, but this seems high.

Leynos•about 2 hours ago

Not that I give much credence to anything Zitron says, but the amount of inference you can get on a £200 a month OpenAI or Anthropic subscription is easily an order of magnitude more than what you'd get paying the same amount at subscription rate.

Although I would also point out that OpenAI recently tripled the amount of Codex inference you get per month for £200 (and to head off the suggestion, this is distinct from their current 2x promotion on £100/month plans)

PunchyHamster•about 1 hour ago

> Not that I give much credence to anything Zitron says, but the amount of inference you can get on a £200 a month OpenAI or Anthropic subscription is easily an order of magnitude more than what you'd get paying the same amount at subscription rate.

Neither of those is how much it actually costs the company selling the service. And I have feeling they are running at loss here so the play is "get everything possible using LLMs then jack up the pricing"

semiquaver•about 1 hour ago

There have been plenty of studies which indicate that inference considered by itself is almost certainly quite profitable at all the frontier labs. The problem is amortizing the cost of all the expensive training runs required to train new models into the revenue stream.

paulddraper•about 2 hours ago

*more than what you'd get paying the same amount at usage rate.

pier25•about 2 hours ago

> 10x the subscription price, but this seems high

Inference is cheap but training is quite expensive. Plus all the money they've invested and keep investing on hardware, data centers, etc. And evidently they also need to make a profit at some point.

xienze•about 2 hours ago

> Inference is cheap

Maybe from the perspective of traditional, turn-based chat. But when you start having developers command an army of agents that work around the clock, those cheap tokens start adding up fast...

mbb70•about 2 hours ago

If the unit-economics work out and they can sell $0.99 of tokens for $1.00, doesn't matter how many agents you spin up. The flat rate subscriptions can't last though.

altmanaltman•about 2 hours ago

ShitHub

PunchyHamster•about 1 hour ago

SlopHub if anything, their parent corporation is Microslop so it fits

infecto•about 2 hours ago

Shame on you for bringing down the quality.

altmanaltman•about 1 hour ago

Did I bring down the quality of GitHub? Shame on you for personal attacks and adding nothing that's even tangentially related to the topic (at least my comment was on topic)

infecto•38 minutes ago

You didn’t bring down GitHub. You brought down the thread.

There’s a difference between criticizing a company and just swapping names for insults. The former can be useful, the latter just turns the discussion into noise. If you’ve got a point about Copilot or the review feature, make it. Otherwise it’s hard to see what anyone is supposed to take away from “ShitHub” other than childish shit-posting.