GitHub Actions Feels Bad
Why Hacker News recommends it
Pointed to in GitHub Actions threads as a well-argued critique of how brittle and confused the platform is.
What it is
A fasterthanlime video essay arguing that GitHub Actions is a poorly designed system, with a history of personal computing and CI, and a look at how it works behind the scenes. It is sponsored by Brilliant.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2024 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec asmor · 2025-12 · on “GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst”
See also this excellent video essay by fasterthanlime: GitHub Actions Feels Bad[1]. I'm pretty sure it contains the exact line of it being "deeply confused about being a package manager". [1]: [this video]
Recommends mardifoufs · 2024-01 · on “GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer”
I prefer GA to basically every other build system especially because of the plugins but yeah, and I think caching can be turned on... but it has tons of inconsistencies related to packages and deps. This video really highlighted just how brittle the whole thing is even behind the scenes: [this video] (13:58 time stamp for the part that is especially relevant here)
Cites supriyo-biswas · 2024-06 · on “What scripting languages come out of the box on Debian 12?”
> Knowing that a language is installed by default on the most popular Linux distribution can simplify certain concerns considerably The author laments the decline of such knowledge, but the proliferation of containers, combined with the marketing efforts of the large cloud providers has reduced the number of people who work with servers directly. I should say that this knowledge can be useful in certain niche situations, though. For example, I recently learned that GitHub Actions pulls in a basic set of utilities by using complicated distro detection[1], and Gitlab runners similarly pulls in a Docker image with git just to clone a repository! Instead, the proper way to address this situation