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GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes
- mhitza 5mo agoInteresting, 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.
- AlexandrB 5mo agoExpect 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 5mo agoNot 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)
- paulddraper 5mo ago*more than what you'd get paying the same amount at usage rate.
- Leynos 5mo agoYes, thanks. Too late to edit now, sadly.
- PunchyHamster 5mo 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 5mo agoThere 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.
- pkaye 5mo agoDoes that mean those running the open models are highly profitable since they don't have to do any training?
- polski-g 5mo agoYes obviously, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it; they'd just go back to mining shitcoins.
- semiquaver 5mo agoI don’t know about highly since they have no moat even more than Antrhropic and OpenAI have no moat. Anyone with a few hundred thousand dollars or sufficient free GPUs can compete with them. So running an open model should earn a market-rate margin.
- o10449366 5mo agoYeah, 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.
- pier25 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoIf 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.
- xienze 5mo ago> If the unit-economics work out and they can sell $0.99 of tokens for $1.00 I think the margins have to be a lot higher than that in order to give investors the return they're expecting, to continue the never-ending training treadmill, and to build more and more datacenters to accommodate people basically DDOS'ing the GPUs in order to run their workloads. Yes, in theory what you said makes sense. But the tightrope these companies have to walk is that the per-token costs still have to be low enough that developers and companies don't just say "ehhh I guess we can still do all this work the old-fashioned way" but ALSO high enough to cover the massive expenses AND astronomical returns everyone's expecting.
- maccard 5mo agoVC investment isn’t about margins, it’s about finding a unicorn. It doesn’t matter if margins are negative if your product is dominant in the market as you can fiddle with the margins after the fact. You just need to be invested long enough to see everyone else fail.
- dotdi 5mo agoI feel the rug under my feet moving. Is it being pulled?!
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoJust you wait, this is a gentle tug to test how hard they can pull when the time comes.
- xienze 5mo agoIt'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.
- awakeasleep 5mo agoI wonder if it has anything to do with the war in the Middle East forcing gulf states to scale back investment
- eastbound 5mo agoIf 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.
- swiftcoder 5mo agoIts 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.
- xienze 5mo ago
- silverwind 5mo agoThis seems nonsensical. Why would non-actions activity consume actions budget?
- throwatdem12311 5mo ago“F*ck you. Pay me.” That’s why.
- freedomben 5mo agoAgreed, 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 5mo agoIt does, read the article. This feature now consumes actions credits and AI credits.
- freedomben 5mo agoYeah 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 5mo agoCode review ostensibly takes place inside a container runtime just like tests or other actions would. It makes sense to me.
- PunchyHamster 5mo agobut 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
- 1qaboutecs 5mo agoscary but thank goodness github actions is highly reliable, robust to change, and has a simple-to-understand ontology.
- paulddraper 5mo agoTo the naysayers, I would point out that actions has not only one but TWO 9s of uptime. [1] [1] https://www.githubstatus.com/ https://www.githubstatus.com/
- infecto 5mo agoFor 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 5mo agoWe had more build failures in 2025 due to Actions outages or degraded service than any other reason.
- infecto 5mo agoWhich is fair but inversely we do many builds throughout the day most business days and have not had an impact where we noticed it. Could also be that we deploy often and frequently and have setup our builds to be as quick as possible so any issues would likely go unnoticed.
- maccard 5mo agoYeah totally. We use GitHub + actions for backend, and self host Perforce + TeamCity for our main game codebase. We had 0 downtime in 12 months on our TC as a comparison. I know there’s a difference between running an internal service and developing a global scale platform that is abused, but as a user I don’t care about those concerns, I care about the platform being up!
- altmanaltman 5mo ago[flagged]
- infecto 5mo ago[flagged]
- altmanaltman 5mo ago[flagged]
- infecto 5mo agoYou 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.
- altmanaltman 5mo agoI really don't understand your point. You're saying we're turning discussions into noise and continuing to spam comments that are not even related to topic. Hard to take this seriously other than just bullying because you get triggered by a word. I concede there's no point replying to you anymore although I tried to reason about your meaness.
- infecto 5mo ago[dead]
- Chris2048 5mo agoThere's a perfectly functional voting mechanism for that..
- semiquaver 5mo agoGood 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 5mo 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.
- semiquaver 5mo agoThe tell-tale just lit up on your sarcasm detector, better get it serviced.
- alex_suzuki 5mo agoGitLab 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.
- taormina 5mo agoThey 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.
- dgellow 5mo agoGitHub has already lost so much good will. It was one of the best pace on the internet for like a decade and is now just a real pain in the ass to interact with
- aleksiy123 5mo agoAnyone 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.
- funkypants 5mo agoHost your own GitLab runner?
- Atotalnoob 5mo agoYour 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 5mo agoYeah, 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 5mo agoEphemeral, beefy fly.io instances?
- alemanek 5mo ago
- Frieren 5mo agoAs 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?
- yeswecatan 5mo agoI assume because local models are nowhere near as good. Hoping I’m wrong!
- datsci_est_2015 5mo agoThe 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 5mo agoThe 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.
- datsci_est_2015 5mo agoI use it as code scaffolding, which means in a way I’m often rewriting it. For me, writing from scratch isn’t the same amount of effort as using a code scaffolding tool.
- lukaslalinsky 5mo agoI disagree, even though I'd love for it to be different. With models like Opus, I can give it a good architecture and expect good results. For many of the less expensive models, that is not the case, they make mistakes, you need to over specify, they get stuck in a loop, etc. As you get to the models you can realistically run locally, it gets so frustrating I'd rather be writing the code myself.
- infecto 5mo agoUnclear 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.
- tuo-lei 5mo agois 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.
- nickjj 5mo agoThey should also remove Copilot code reviews from being counted as metrics in a PR. 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. 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.
- breakpointalpha 5mo agoIf I had a magic wand, I would enforce an internet-wide separation of human activity metrics from bots. I want to know how many real humans read my post, commented, shared etc. Clankers can keep their own counts.
- duxup 5mo agoReddit is slowly dying for me for that reason. So many bot / bot like accounts that seem ... off / hidden histories. Trust level with any given comment or post now is reaching 0 fast. It's a bummer because it's hitting a lot of users and even valid users who don't communicate good are getting hit hard too with skeptical responses.
- toraway 5mo agoYep, allowing users to hide history has made it straightforward for bots to exist unchallenged. Previously a quick scan of comment history would make it obvious you're looking at an LLM, now you're stuck arguing over a one off comment where they can get away with benefit of the doubt.
- georgel 5mo agoThe irony of Reddit's early days was that it was bootstrapped with fake accounts run by the founder.
- SchemaLoad 5mo ago
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo agoI 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...
- skydhash 5mo agoIf 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. If you want to make your repos public, you could use cgit and the like.
- Levanta 5mo ago[flagged]
- veidr 5mo agoThis is funny, but Copilot is still an interesting case-study and (probably) failed predictor of where we are headed. We all know, and have known for a long time, that the AI labs selling dollars for a nickel are going to pull that rug, and up that price, at some point. Copilot, though, has been consistently the weakest mainstream AI coding offering. Inferior to Cursor or Windsurf at editor completions, inferior to Codex, Claude, OpenCode, blah blah blah, at agentic coding and also the old-school chat-style... And now, it's no longer cheap AND now sucks even more than it has all along — the new $39/month plan is not only worse than all its competitors, but worse than its own $10 plan was a month ago — by a lot. The thing is, you can't jack the price up unless you're good enough — at least on some axis, to some customer segment — to jack the price. And when you're not good enough, and you have vastly superior competitors who are not doing that yet... you're just forfeiting the game. Which I agree, Copilot should do — it's the Windows Phone of AI coding assistants, after all — it still seems weird to me to just commit humiliating suicide rather that trying to make some deal with one of those superior competitors. Instead of just jumping into a dumpster and lighting yourself on fire.
- recursivegirth 5mo agoMicroslop has lost their way from their ole acquisition investments and have instead hedged a bet on vibing their way into other industries.
- 999900000999 5mo agoI suspect Microsoft will reneg if enough people cancel. Even before yesterday, I assumed they made money via the gym model. I'd have months where I'm too busy to use my co pilot subscription in any meaningful way. Canceling and restarting is too much of a hassle. But with the pricing update I'd probably use up the 10$ plan within 3 days. I don't know if anything else is integrated so we'll into GitHub though. I might keep the 10$ plan just for the occasional GitHub AI PR.
- matheusmoreira 5mo ago> it's the Windows Phone of AI coding assistants, after all It seems everything Microsoft does is like this nowadays. They just can't seem to win anymore.
- pando85 5mo agoDouble billing for minutes and tokens is intentional obfuscation. You can't trace actual cost.
- vjerancrnjak 5mo agoGithub was already struggling with bazillions of throw-as-much-crap-on-the-wall software running in actions, and now the world is running throw-as-much-LLM-crap-on-the-wall computation, as unstoppable as the pre-LLM era. Turning compute into excrement as fast as the planet is filled with it. Excrement being "Github Copilot code review" in compute world, and no need to draw what it is in our real world. Weird that Anthropic decided to build a Claude Code Routines toilet.
- BadBadJellyBean 5mo agoWe are slowly inching closer to the point where AI and AI products will be billed for what they cost. We are currently living in the heavily discounted world where everything subsidized to the point where a lot of it is free. It seems like they can't or won't keep that up anymore. My prediction is that whenever one of the big companies raise their prices or move features to higher tiers others will follow soon. They all feel the pressure and non of them want to give away more money than they need to. I wonder if managers will be as excited about AI when the prices go up.
- sassymuffinz 5mo agoIt's humorous to me that I can do the work of an AI with nothing but a coffee and an occasional sandwich and yet they talk about AI as if it's some sort of magic hack to productivity. What they don't like is paying money for the work, that's all that matters to them.
- jakobnissen 5mo agoYou work for sandwiches and coffee, and not for a decent salary?
- sassymuffinz 5mo agoI get paid a decent salary for my expertise and this wild thing called remembering what happened yesterday. My point is my compute is powered by bananas and coffee, not gigawatts of energy and all of the RAM.
- rescripting 5mo agoFrom the POV of your employer your compute is powered by your decent salary, not bananas and coffee. If that goes away you’d be a fool to keep pointing your brain at your employer’s problems. Thus, your compute is significantly more expensive than AI. Thankfully your taste is also part of your package deal, and is where you deliver real the value over an LLM.
- xiaod 5mo agoI'd want to see more about the failure modes. Production systems need graceful degradation more than optimal performance.
- cdnsteve 5mo agoBy fall most execs will be asking about the new spend and GitHub alternatives will be researched. Between 27x model costs and this, CVE exploits and downtime their platform is starting to feel like a questionable decision.
- hrpnk 5mo agoWonder if folks will flock to competitors that still over fixed-price review packages only for those companies to switch to usage-based pricing. They're next to be overrun with new customers and sit on the increasing bills.
- mawadev 5mo agoI use AI when its free, but very sparingly when I try to get some sample code. Paying for that thing seems like an insane concept to me. I'm really glad it never became integral to my skillset or day to day work. Seems like a lot of people will feel the pain of getting rug pulled harder sooner or later. At this point any company sensibly investing in this technology is going the offline/self host route, because they smell the pattern of vendor/cloud lock in ten miles away
- mark_l_watson 5mo agoI love LLM tech and want to see it support viable long term businesses that don't rely on losing money providing subsidized subscriptions that lose money. I ranted about this on X yesterday, primarily about a legal framework to prevent LLM dumping: https://x.com/mark_l_watson/status/2049221176657129794 https://x.com/mark_l_watson/status/2049221176657129794
- kk_mors 5mo ago[dead]
- bmd1905 5mo ago[flagged]