Posted by codesuki 1 day ago
Very helpful for a monster repo with giant task graph
Still, I wonder who is still looking manually at CI build logs. You can use an agent to look for you, and immediately let it come up with a fix.
I have one job that runs a shell script that runs tests, a second one that builds and pushes the docker image, and a third one that triggers CD.
Could it be faster? Yes. Could the log viewer be better? Yes. Could the configuration file format be better? Yes. Could the credentials work better? Yes.
However they're well integrated with GitHub (including GHCR), work well and are affordable.
But also, CI should be the last line of defense, not the first line.
If your system is not byzantine, you should be able to run almost all your tests locally and not need to boot a cloud machine that has to be setup from scratch and deal with all the overhead in your core loop.
Having a build system that knows what tests need to be run helps here since you're no longer just throwing compute at the problem.
It's fantastic for simple jobs, I use it for my hobbyist projects because I just need 20 to 30 lines to build and deploy a web build.
Just because a bike isn't good for traveling in freezing weather doesn't mean no one should own a bike.
Pick the right tool for the job.
Plus CI/CD is the boring part. I always imagined GH Actions as a quick and somewhat sloppy solution for hobbyist projects.
Not for anything serious.
> Every CI system eventually becomes “a bunch of YAML.” I’ve been through the five stages of grief about it and emerged on the other side, diminished but functional.
> I understand the appeal. I have felt it myself, late at night, after the fourth failed workflow run in a row. The desire to burn down the YAML temple and return to the simple honest earth of #!/bin/bash and set -euo pipefail. To cast off the chains of marketplace actions and reusable workflows and just write the damn commands. It feels like liberation. It is not.
Ah yes, misery loves company! There's nothing like a good rant (preferably about a technology you have to use too, although you hate its guts) to brighten up your Friday...
We're running a self-hosted GitLab -> hosted GitHub migration at my company (which to me feels a downgrade), and without LLMs I would have spent weeks just researching syntax for how to implement the requirements I had.
I asked Claude to simply "translate these GL templates to GH actions, I want 1 flow for this, 1 flow for that, etc" and it mostly worked. Then in the repos I link the template and ask Claude to write the workflow that uses the template with the correct inputs. I think I saved maybe 3 months worth of coding and debugging workflows. Besides maybe picking slightly outdated actions (e.g. action@v4 instead of action@v6), 95% of the work was ok, and I had to tweak a couple things afterwards.
> managed to throw AI efficiently
> and it mostly worked.
Looks like you're mostly doing your job, not quite there, but mostly
webhooks to an external system was such a better way to do it, and somehow we got away from that, because they don't want us to leave.
webhooks are to podcasts as github actions are to the things that spotify calls podcasts.