GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes

We 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.

They 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.

scary but thank goodness github actions is highly reliable, robust to change, and has a simple-to-understand ontology.

This 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.

As 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?

I feel the rug under my feet moving. Is it being pulled?!

Github 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.

This seems nonsensical. Why would non-actions activity consume actions budget?

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.

Double billing for minutes and tokens is intentional obfuscation. You can't trace actual cost.

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...

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.

Interesting, 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.

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?

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.

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.

[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.

Pain point discussion

ShitHub