I feel like non-professional vibe coders are scapegoated too often. I'm a professional software engineer with extensive experience in CI/CD pipelines. And I heap on 30x more stress on GitHub than I did before AI-powered development took over - because (1) I'm much more efficient and running many development tasks in parallel, and (2) CI runs are one of my tools for ensuring that quality doesn't degrade with velocity.

I think that even if you stripped out non-professional vibe coders from the equation - the problem is still there, and will keep compounding.

The numbers are not that high as you would think.

Last year Github said they are giving away 11.5B action minutes [1] for public repos for free, that translates to about ~30,000 cores . The explosion in commits, pull requests and action minutes that Vlad the CTO mentioned[2] in the August postmortem is approximately 10x and he also highlighted they added 3 Million cores to their fleet.

Assuming a similar 10X growth in open source; total public repo compute budget is only 10% of the new compute they have added. Only half of Github is on Azure as of April, and Azure itself is much much larger.

Last year numbers were worth $180 Million going by list prices of action minutes [3]. However that would be only $20-30M equivalent typical outlay for a mid-size tech company if they were actually buying 30,000 cores on the cloud ; and definitely much cheaper for Azure's procurement ;

It is a good PR strategy and very good deal for Open Source but is really only a small customer acquisition line item for them and doesn't likely meaningfully impact their compute issues one way or other.

[1] https://github.com/resources/insights/2026-pricing-changes-f...

[2] https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17...

[3] Action minutes are priced more expensive than even buying on-demand compute on the cloud including with Azure;

Why does it go down for everyone because of some inefficient CI pipelines?

I wonder about this too. Whenever you ask a question to do something in GitHub Actions it comes up with an answer that kinda works, but I would've never chosen because it works around the inherent limitations of GitHub Actions.

Those limitations were put in place for a reason, and using the work-around feels dirty. I recognize that all platforms are flawed once you start to do more than they offer, but I feel that with AI its easier to build the plumbing around it.

The question shouldn't be: can you do this, but 'is this the right thing to do'?

Yeah, CI being free for public repos, kind of encourages people to just add whatever AI suggests to CI.

For one of my green-field projects that I just vibe-coded with AI's (where Claude, Codex and Gemini critique each other's design and code), a PR could go through many iterations (commits) until every AI approves, and if every commit runs the CI, it'd be very slow. So I eventually come up with a mechanism to only run CI when all reviewers approve. That improves things a lot.

It feels more like volume than speed. AI has actually improved our speed quite a bit, as it is fairly easy to just get AI to make it fast. Will vibe coders do this, probably not. That said our volume is probably 10-30x in commits and ci jobs as we had pre-march.

I don't think it's just AI, it's an AI layer on top of the Microsoft layer. Both of those are inefficiencies on their own, but combined they're pretty spectacular. Just imagine spec-driven development over there and the titles of everyone with a hand in the markdown.

I was thinking the other day...what about a captcha that filter out developers from vibe coders, without letting them know.

So you can reduce the free resources they consume with the slop.

I'm guessing it just has more to do with commiting and pushing and automatic CI builds.

Nothing about complexity, simply github setup such an easy automated system but AI cares not about whether their commit+push is going to kcik off a whole rebuild.

Same thing happens when I run docker build loops. The AI gives very little shit, unless I tell it, about not busting cache; so it'll sit there for hours making minor changes just to make a 30 minute build.

AI has not concern about how long anything takes, in general, but it if it's just waiting for it to return, it won't get impatient.

if only there was a way to say "i know wtf im doing, give my workers precedence, i'll pay for it" the billing model for gh actions is ... i still don't understand it.