Which certainly made me shit myself, briefly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1toa9tf/mode...

So why are Actions so unreliable anyway? Occam's Razor would probably suggest the domain is inherently complex/difficult; but other providers show that reliability is possible. What would Occam's Razor suggest next? Poor management..?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47237377

The latest language models have enabled this sort of thing for me. I can integrate a mini Jenkins into every project within a 5-10 minute prompting session. This sort of code isn't hard. It's just tedious, and the LLMs absolutely rock at boring repetitive stuff. Having a win32 service start up successfully on the very first try is something I haven't experienced until 2026.

For Git, all you technically need is ssh access and some backup strategy for your server. It would be bare bones but workable. And there are of course plenty of OSS things that are a lot nicer than that.

I'm still using gh and gh actions and we are mostly below the freemium layer with that. But it is kind of slow and honestly a dedicated vm plus some high CPU/memory workers we can spin up on a need to have basis might be a lot faster. With GH outages becoming more common, my hand might be forced a bit.

In recent weeks, I've spun up listmonk (mailing list solution), matrix (as a slack alternative), and a few other things specific to our software stack. A github alternative would be more of the same. We don't need a lot.

The main objection is that with more moving parts to worry about, the workload for me also increases. Things need updating, monitoring, backups, alerting (and responding to alerts), etc. That sucks up my time and that is scarce.

Another reason for self hosting these days is that with agentic AI tools, self hosted things are a lot easier to integrate into agentic systems. If it is self hosted, you don't have to worry about API limitations, rate limitations, walled gardens, etc. All the traditional SAAS silos are becoming a problem from that point of view. The more locked down it is, the bigger the motive for moving away from it. That's why we ditched Slack for Matrix. Slack is hopelessly locked down and tedious to deal with. Matrix is super easy for this.

No, it's not like "act," because it uses the standard Github runner, the difference is that the control plane is an emulation of api.github.com, because of this we can do all kinds of nice things:

Caching in ~0 ms. Pause on failure, so you can let your AI agent fix it and retry without pushing.

Setting it all up would have been tediously annoying eight months ago (Buildkite requires setting up GitHub webhooks for each repo).

Last week I just had codex set up everything, ephemeral vm runners and all, using a couple of low-spec refurb mac minis, Buildkite’s API, a short-lived API token, and migrate my repositories one by one.

So far so good, it’ll pay for itself within two to three months, and following today’s outage I suggested at work that we experiment with the same set up.

They’re considering it.

I much prefer Woodpecker CI, which is an open source fork of Drone.io. It supports multiple Git backends like GitHub, Gitea, Forgejo, Gitlab, Bitbucket. It supports running jobs locally, on Docker, and on Kubernetes. And there's autoscalers built in for AWS, Hetzner, Linode, Vultr, and Scaleway. There's a bunch of 3rd party plugins (https://woodpecker-ci.org/plugins) for custom integrations. The UX is also very simple, with OAuth used not only for authentication/authorization but also setting up & accessing repos. The system architecture is great, with separate components that run stateless connected to a database, and a custom plugin is any program that takes environment variables and does stdio. The config file is a good balance of ugly YAML and convenience syntax like shell-style parameter expansion variables.

It probably takes less than 15 minutes to install, set up, and run WoodpeckerCI for a small team, so it's not a big investment to try out or host. With the autoscaling plugins it lets you scale your workload up to whatever size. Honestly you could run it on a laptop since it's written Go.

(to clarify for beginners: the config file docs are found in a section called "workflow syntax" (https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/usage/workflow-syntax) and variable parameter expansion is buried deep in an environment variables page called "string operations" (https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/usage/environment#string-oper...). poorly organized docs aside, the system itself works well)

Something’s wrong when my own infrastructure is more reliable than Microsoft’s.

"Microsoft’s GitHub was positioned to win the AI coding race. Outages got in the way" - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-was-positioned-to-...

EDIT: sorry i meant this rant at the one complaining for the free service not for the paid customers (which is unacceptable)

We have already seen this in the last some weeks, but now this has become a meme that keeps on giving. GitHub down! GitHub up again. GitHub Down! GitHub ... ...

The open source contribution model as we once knew it is dead; you're not going to accept patches from random agents. The risk is way too high. And you can see that increasingly "AI Slop" makes it difficult to be a maintainer of any semblance of a popular repo.

So what's the value? A durable place to store work? hah.

Discovery? That part of Github has always been shitty.

So that leaves.. Github Actions? The thing that is down every other day and has been the subject of a few ~rug pulls~/attempted price hikes that are almost surely coming back?

This is a conservative estimate assuming linear growth, the actual number is likely going to be higher. Much higher.

It's not too hard to grow 14X YoY if you start from a hundred customers. If you have hundreds of millions? Yeah, not so easy.

[1] https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

Thanks for pointing out that nobody is using that thing

- GitHub

- Hiring budgets

- RAM (/personal computing in general)

- Electricity

- Media/Content

- Truth

With all the recent negativity – how are they not even TRYING to fix the damn thing?

I like being able to vote with my (teams) wallet and I'm tired of staying out of convenience

I've done some hacky shit in CI scripts, but none made me more mad than that one.

Perfect timing that we post https://www.jxd.dev/writing/building-plain just as this latest incident started.

Self hosted Gitlab with self hosted (or AWS) runners running your pipelines.. We only use Github as a mirror for our public repositories.

This is why we don't use Github Actions, kids.

Seriously, its a proprietary build service that puts the keys to the kingdom in someone elses' control. Just: No!

Print this status page to PDF so you've got it handy next time someone castigates you for not using Github Actions, folks.

This time today it was caused by friendly fire by the automatic suspension of the GitHub Actions bot which is now a "Ghost" user. Since there is no CEO of GitHub to contact it we are just going to see more [1] of this again.

You might need to push a critical change soon, but now you cannot. You won't get any of these issues if you self hosted as I said 6 years ago...[2]

[0] https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/g6ffrm0rfvz9

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48085501

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

I'm guessing related to this? The blog post is dated 11 days ago but I just noticed a blue banner on my actions page today.