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Comment by xlii | Hacker News Reader

There is one thing that I haven’t seen mentioned: worst possible feedback loop.

I’ve noticed this phenomenon few times already, and I think there’s nothing worse than having a 30-60s feedback loop. The one that keeps you glued to the screen but otherwise is completely nonproductive.

I tried for many moons to replicate GHA environment on local and it’s impossible in my context. So every change is like „push, wait for GH to pickup, act on some stupid typo or inconsistency, rinse, repeat”.

It’s like a slot machine „just one more time and it will run”, eating away focus and time.

It took me 25 minutes to get 5s build process. Naive build with GHA? 3 minutes, because dependencies et al. Ok, let’s add caching. 10 hours fly by.

The cost of failure and focus drop is enormous.

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Feel this pain so much. If you are debugging Github Action container builds, and each takes over ~40 minutes to build.. you can burn through a whole work day only testing six or seven changes.

There has to be a better way. How has nobody figured this out?

There is act, that allows you to run actions locally. Although not exactly the same as the real thing, it can save time.

https://github.com/nektos/act

In organization setting this is almost useless if you are (or forced to) use some pre-made actions and/or actions that are for your organization only (they cannot be downloaded) also useless if you are forced to use self hosted runner with image that you don't have access to. Not to mention env/secrets and networking...

This is a great tool, but I always cringe when something so important comes from a third party

act is brilliant - it really helps iterate on github or gitea actions locally.

There's dagger; CI as code. Test your pipeline locally, in your IDE.

With GitLab, I have found https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local to be an incredible time-saver when working with GitLab pipelines (similar to https://github.com/nektos/act for GitHub)

I wish GitLab/GitHub would provide a way to do this by default, though.

act is great. I use it to iterate on actions locally (I self-host gitea actions, which uses act, so it's identical to github actions).

This is exactly a big piece of our frustration -- the terrible feedback loop and how much mental space it wastes. OP does talk about this at the end (babysitting the endless "wip" commits till something works).

Highly recommend nektos/act, and if it's something complex enough, you can Ssh into the server to investigate. There are many action that facilitate this.

I use LLMs for a lot of things these days, but maybe the most important one is as a focus-preserving mechanism for exactly these kinds of middle-ground async tasks that have a feedback loop measured in a handful of minutes.

If the process is longer than a few minutes, I can switch tasks while I wait for it. It's waiting for those things in the 3-10 minute range that is intolerable for me: long enough I will lose focus, not long enough for me to context switch.

Now I can bullshit with the LLM about something related to the task while I wait, which helps me to stay focused on it.

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