They should also remove Copilot code reviews from being counted as metrics in a PR.<p>I've seen some projects that use it and you open the PR page to be greeted by every PR having 3-20 comments but when you goto the actual PR, there's no one except the contributor with a bunch of Copilot feedback.<p>It gives a false message that the PR is resonating with folks and has real activity. I wonder if GitHub did this on purpose to make engagement seem higher than it really is.
If I had a magic wand, I would enforce an internet-wide separation of human activity metrics from bots.<p>I want to know how many real humans read my post, commented, shared etc.<p>Clankers can keep their own counts.
scary but thank goodness github actions is highly reliable, robust to change, and has a simple-to-understand ontology.
As financial markets get tighter AI companies will stop subsidizing their services and charge enough money to actually make a profit.<p>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?
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.
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.
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.
The claim was "It is cheaper", not "It will be cheaper". Until it actually _is_ cheaper, it doesn't make much sense to purchase $10k+ in hardware to run local models that are still worse than the frontier offerings.
> Until it actually _is_ cheaper, it doesn't make much sense to purchase<p>Once it is cheaper, there will be more demand so it will no longer be cheaper. Buying now gets current prices (though demand is still fairly high).
No it's not. AI products are quite often subsidized. AI inference very certainly is not.<p>There are more and more independent AI inference providers without VC backing that serve open weight models on a ~cost-plus basis that show that subsidies are not significant for AI inference.
if only there was a place that was naturally cold to take advantage of airflow for cooling and cheap renewable electricity thats always on...
I assume because local models are nowhere near as good. Hoping I’m wrong!
The better your code is architected, the less powerful model you’ll need for it to make sense of it.<p>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.<p>And this already saves me dozens of minutes per week, although it’s not a 2x multiplier in my efficiency.
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.
> As financial markets get tighter ...<p>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.<p>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.<p>The only way for governments who ever spend way more than they bring in taxpayer dollars is to de-valuate the currency.<p>So "financial markets getting tighter": probably won't last.
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.
I feel the rug under my feet moving. Is it being pulled?!
Just you wait, this is a gentle tug to test how hard they can pull when the time comes.
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.
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.
I think there's "sort of" a moat for non-Chinese vendors. As much as people distrust the US right now, I think deep down inside everyone knows that the second you let a Chinese provider do inference on your codebase they're gonna suck up every bit of it. But hey, cheap tokens, right?<p>So you'll probably never see government customers allow that and neither will a lot of commercial customers.
Why do we assume us providers aren't doing the same? Also all the Chinese providers are giving open weight models. Many you can run locally.<p>I don't see the risk. If your code is easily AI generated you don't have a moat anyways. A Chinese competitor probably won't have as easy of a time as a US one of you operate in the US
The US has robust IP and trademark law that allows companies some amount of chance to find a legal remedy to anyone who clones their business. China is notorious for protecting local companies from foreign IP suits.<p>Further, at a lot of companies, the risk has to be acceptable to shareholders and auditors. Perceived risk is often a more powerful motivator than actual risk.
> robust IP and trademark law<p>lmao tell that to the artists, authors and foss contributors whose work has been cloned into the llm oracle
Once your code, images, etc pass into the slop machine it is owned by whoever generated it later. Obviously they would need a new logo, llc, and some ui theme tweaks. Otherwise none of these AI coder products would exist.<p>Also, how long do you think openai, Microsoft, Google, anthropic, etc could delay a lawsuit while you pay hundreds of thousands in legal retainers? 5 years? 10?
> As much as people distrust the US right now<p>From the perspective of someone currently living in the EU... I'd say thats pretty much a wash (or even slightly tilted in China's favour) for folks outside the US
Fortunately there’s plenty of open weight models that are just safetensors and you have a wide variety of providers to choose from, as well as just hosting it yourself.
Times would have been much more 'interesting' - for better or worse - had the LLM movement occurred during the zero interest-rate era.
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.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the war in the Middle East forcing gulf states to scale back investment
making you pay the actual price of a product is a rug pull now?
It is if you start by charging significantly less than the actual price to get people hooked
Maybe, but this is also a company whose parent organization is worth a trillion+ dollars that have monopolies in multiple verticals. I know American corpos hate the idea of protecting the commons and would rather fuck it raw to fulfill their carnal urge for profit, but you know there are some public goods and services worth fulfilling for a highly productive industry.<p>Maybe the government should nationalize GitHub at this point as it is absolutely critical for US infrastructure and MSFT has shown to be a terrible steward for the public.
Not yet... I calculated they under charge by 50-90X soooo
This seems nonsensical. Why would non-actions activity consume actions budget?
<p><pre><code> > Last month, we shared how GitHub Copilot code review runs on […] GitHub Actions using GitHub-hosted runners.
</code></pre>
They say that they’re now billing against their actual costs
Copilot Code Reviews <i>are</i> Actions workflows. Just privileged ones you can't edit the YAML for. They even litter your Actions tab list and Deployment environments.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
> 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<p>Hang on, I read this as copilot reviews with bill <i>both</i> actions minutes and AI credits. Did I miss something?
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.
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
Code review ostensibly takes place inside a container runtime just like tests or other actions would. It makes sense to me.
[dead]
“F*ck you. Pay me.”<p>That’s why.
I started moving my repos off GitHub weeks ago, but I'm still waiting for a "good" GitHub competitor to appear. GitLab sucks (if you're not a company and like unnecessary complexity), Codeberg is slow and limited (and has weird mods), Sourcehut UX is weird (and being DDoS'd), Gitea Cloud didn't even have a working login page last time I tried, BitBucket isn't the worst but it has quite a few problems (& isn't set up for public repos/search). Please can somebody start a simple, reliable hosted GitHub alternative? I'd pay for it...
If you want collaboration for your team, then a small vm with forgejo (if you need PR) is enough. It can be behind a vpn if you do not want to bother with securing it against the whole internet.<p>If you want to make your repos public, you could use cgit and the like.
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.
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.
> Good thing GitHub has plenty of built-up goodwill to spend down<p>Do they, though? I don't know a single person who uses GitHub who actually <i>likes</i> 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)."<p>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.
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.
The tell-tale just lit up on your sarcasm detector, better get it serviced.
They burned through their goodwill years ago and are insistent on reminding us all that they are now exactly as shitty as Microsoft because they it’s all Microslop worst customer practices.
Interesting, I didn't know minutes where free before.<p>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.
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.
Anyone have good alternatives for ci/cd on the cheap for a solo dev?<p>I’m blowing through my 1000 mins in days.<p>Thinking to either pool some free tiers or figure something out with spot instances.<p>Also is it just me or is CI/CD tooling still sort of rough all around.
Your best bet is to self host woodpecker CI.<p>Hetzner has cheap VPS that I host my CI on. It costs like $10/month.<p>Pick the cheapest region, since CI runners location doesn’t matter much.
Yeah, I did hertzner runner for a bit.<p>But I think the issue is that my situation (solo dev, mono repo) is just not right for a dedicated instance.<p>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).<p>I guess what I'm really looking for is for some kind of aggressive autoscaling, and aggressive caching.<p>I tried a couple of things (GHA, Dagger + Hertzner, Buildkite)<p>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.<p>Im tempted to just get agent to build something out quickly with cloudflare workers + spot instances.<p>I also have some other nice to have requirements:<p>- ts/code over config<p>- locally runnable and testable<p>- preferably no lock in<p>- repeatable/reproducible
Not sure of what current prices look like but an old desktop sitting on the floor of your office might work well for you. You would need decent internet but running a single node kubernetes cluster as a GitHub action runner has worked well for others I know.<p>A buddy of mine runs his whole CICD setup off an old gaming desktop. They use tailscale to connect to their hosted infrastructure and set it up as a GitHub action runner.<p>For a solo dev this might be the way to go.
Ephemeral, beefy fly.io instances?
> And at least 50% of the time its idle (I'm not working/sleeping).<p>So what? its $10 a month. Why do you need to chase 100% utilization?<p>And use can use that to host your website, a game server, maybe some other projects...
I have Gitea and Gitea Runner apps running on TrueNAS on an extra mini PC in a closet. Works better than GitHub for me.
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).<p><a href="https://docs.drone.io/server/provider/github/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.drone.io/server/provider/github/</a><p>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.<p>Otherwise it's very similar in concept - define actions in a yaml file, run commands on an image, webhook integration with most repo providers.<p>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.<p>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.
We use jayporeci.in and have never hit capacity problems since we can choose to run it in laptops / servers / spare VMs etc.<p>Best decision we ever made
Host your own GitLab runner?
There is a free tier for on-prem TeamCity.
Pain point discussion
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.<p>[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.
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.<p>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)
> 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.<p>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"
Yeah, I'm sure the numbers are a bit inflated compared to API, but with my Claude $200/month subscription I've supposedly consumed 12,160,410,828 tokens in April for a cost of $22,733.03.
*more than what you'd get paying the same amount at <i>usage</i> rate.
> <i>10x the subscription price, but this seems high</i><p>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.
> Inference is cheap<p>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...
ShitHub
SlopHub if anything, their parent corporation is Microslop so it fits
Shame on you for bringing down the quality.
There's a perfectly functional voting mechanism for that..
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)
You didn’t bring down GitHub. You brought down the thread.<p>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.