alt Hacker NewsI think this post accurately isolates the single main issue with GitHub Actions, i.e. the lack of a tight feedback loop. Pushing and waiting for completion on what's often a very simple failure mode is frustrating.
Others have pointed out that there are architectural steps you can take to minimize this pain, like keeping all CI operations isolated within scripts that can be run locally (and treating GitHub Actions features purely as progressive enhancements, e.g. only using `GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY` if actually present).
Another thing that works pretty well to address the feedback loop pain is `workflow_dispatch` + `gh workflow run`: you still need to go through a push cycle, but `gh workflow run` lets you stay in development flow until you actually need to go look at the logs.
(One frustrating limitation with that is that `gh workflow run` doesn't actually spit out the URL of the workflow run it triggers. GitHub claims this is because it's an async dispatch, but I don't see how there can possibly be no context for GitHub to provide here, given that they clearly obtain it later in the web UI.)
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I've standardized on getting github actions to create/pull a docker image and run build/test inside that. So if something goes wrong I have a decent live debug environment that's very similar to what github actions is running. For what it's worth.
It's insane to me that being able to run CI steps locally is not the first priority of every CI system. It ought to be a basic requirement.
I’ve contemplated building my own CI tool (with a local runner) and the thing is if you assume “write a pipeline that runs locally but also on push”, then the feature depth is mostly about queuing, analyzing output, and often left off, but IMO important, charting telemetry about the build history.
Most of these are off the shelf, at least in some programming languages. It’s the integrations and the overmanagement where a lot of the weight is.
I've never used gh workflow run, but I have used the GitHub API to run workflows and wanted to show the URL. I had to have it make another call to get the workflow runs and assume the last run is the one with the correct URL. This would obviously not work correctly if there were multiple run requests at the same time. Maybe some more checking could detect that, but it works for my purposes so far.
This is one of the big problems we solved with the RWX CI platform (RWX.com). You can use ‘rwx run’ and it automatically syncs your local changes, so no need to push — and with our automated caching, steps like setting up the environment cache hit so you don’t have to execute the same stuff over and over again while writing your workflow. Plus with our API or MCP server you can get the results directly in your terminal so no need to open the UI at all unless you want to do some in-depth spelunking.
But very often the CI operations _are_ the problem. It's just YAML files with unlimited configuration options that have very limited documentation, without any type of LSP.
> i.e. the lack of a tight feedback loop.
Lefthook helps a lot https://anttiharju.dev/a/1#pre-commit-hooks-are-useful
Thing is that people are not willing to invest in it due to bad experiences with various git hooks, but there are ways to have it be excellent
We need SSH access to the failed instances so we can poke around and iterate from any step in the workflow.
Production runs should be immutable, but we should be able to get in to diagnose, edit, and retry. It'd lead to faster diagnosis, resolution, and fixing.
The logs and everything should be there for us.
And speaking of the logs situation, the GHA logs are really buggy sometimes. They don't load about half of the time I need them to.
I’ve never used Nix and frankly am a sceptic, but can it solve this problem by efficiently caching steps?
https://github.com/nektos/act
Lets you run your actions locally. I've had significant success with it for fast local feedback.