I feel like I could specify and vibe-code a CI workflow system that would be dramatically better (for a single organization’s workflow) than GitHub Actions. And hosting it would be barely more complex than hosting a GitHub Actions self-hosted runner.

The stack would be:

Postgres, as a job queue and job status tracker. The entire control plane state lives in here. Even in a fairly large org, the transaction rate would be very, very low.

An ingestion agent. Monitors the repository for pushes and PRs.

A job agent. This runs a in a sandbox and gets the inputs from GitHub and runs what is effectively a workflow step. It doesn’t get any secrets — everything it wants to do is either accomplished in the form of JSON output, blob output, or an org-specific API for doing things that don’t fit the JSON output model.

A thing to handle results. This is a simple service, connected to the database, that consumes the JSON job results and does whatever is needed (which would mostly consist of commenting on PRs or updating a CI status dashboard). For CD workflows, the build artifacts would be sent to whatever registry they go to.

A configuration system, which would be some files somewhere, maybe in a git repository that is not the repository that CI is being done on. (GitHub’s model of Actions config being in-band in the repository is IMO entirely wrong.)

And that’s about it.

I’m not suggesting that I could duplicate the GitHub Actions in a weekend. But I wouldn’t want to. This would be single-tenant, and it would support exactly the features that the organization actually uses. Heck, even par-for-the-course things like SSO aren’t needed because the entire system would have no users per se :)