TL;DR
- Key Critique: Former CircleCI employee Ian Duncan published a detailed critique calling GitHub Actions “the Internet Explorer of CI” that dominates through convenience rather than quality.
- Business Impact: Slow CI/CD pipelines cost engineering teams up to 20% of weekly productivity, with one team cutting deployment time from 45 minutes to 3 minutes.
- Platform Issues: Users report browser crashes, unreliable log viewing, unpredictable navigation, and security risks from marketplace actions.
- Available Solutions: Teams can switch to faster third-party runners, migrate to alternatives like Buildkite or CircleCI, or implement aggressive caching and parallelization strategies.
Former CircleCI employee Ian Duncan has published a scathing critique of GitHub Actions that exposes systemic problems costing engineering teams countless hours of productivity.
A deployment has been running for forty-five minutes, the yellow dot crawling through CI steps while a product launch looms and a manager breathes down your neck. This scene plays out daily in engineering teams worldwide.
As Developer Duncan argues, GitHub Actions dominates not through quality but through convenience.
One developer at Markaicode described waiting for a GitHub Actions pipeline to finish deploying before a pending product launch, watching helplessly as the process consumed 45 minutes per deployment.
Such delays represent more than minor inconveniences. When developers wait hours for builds, product timelines slip and team morale suffers. Frustration compounds with each sprint as technical debt accumulates.
The Voice of Experience
Ian Duncan brings unusual credibility to this critique. As an early employee at CircleCI with extensive experience across CI systems, he speaks from deep technical knowledge. His assessment of GitHub Actions is unsparing and direct.
“GitHub Actions is not good. It’s not even fine. It has market share because it’s right there in your repo, and that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it.”
Ian Duncan, Author and Former CircleCI Employee (via Ian Duncan)
Microsoft’s ownership of GitHub gives Actions a built-in advantage. The tool won market share by being the default, not by offering superior developer experience. For public repositories, the free tier removes friction to adoption. Yet Duncan argues that convenience masks fundamental problems that worsen as teams scale.
The default integration creates a structural moat competitors struggle to overcome. For engineering leaders, this dynamic forces a difficult calculation: the immediate convenience of native GitHub integration versus the cumulative productivity drag of slower build times. The friction of migration often outweighs visible costs until those costs compound into measurable delivery delays.
When the Tools Fail
These theoretical concerns manifest in daily friction. Duncan documents concrete failures developers encounter routinely. The GitHub Actions log viewer has crashed his browser “repeatedly and reliably,” an experience unique among CI platforms he has used. Large log files often prevent scrolling, forcing workarounds like downloading raw files.
Navigation issues compound these problems. Duncan describes the back button behavior as unpredictable, saying it operates like a roulette wheel. Furthermore, security concerns loom large. He warns that adding marketplace actions means handing house keys to strangers, trusting unknown third parties with production infrastructure access.
These interface deficiencies accumulate into substantial workflow friction. Each browser crash forces context switching, while the inability to navigate efficiently turns routine log review into a chore. For teams running dozens of builds daily, these micro-frictions aggregate into hours of lost productivity. The security concerns add cognitive overhead as engineers must evaluate every marketplace action, creating tension between velocity and infrastructure security.
Depot Engineering characterized GitHub Actions as a “black box” that offers no useful data about build script performance, making optimization difficult even for experienced teams.
The Hidden Cost of Slow Pipelines
The consequences extend beyond developer annoyance into measurable business impact. In an August 2025 case study, Markaicode quantified what slow CI/CD costs.
Their React application initially required 45 minutes per deployment. Through aggressive caching and parallelization, they reduced this to just over 3 minutes, a 93% improvement.
As of August 2025, daily developer wait time dropped from 3.2 hours to 18 minutes per person, a 92% reduction. Failed deployments due to timeouts fell from 12% to zero. Developer satisfaction improved from 2.3/10 to 8.7/10. Deployment frequency increased from 2-3 per day to 15-20. The optimizations saved the team over 240 hours over six months.
Industry research confirms these patterns. JetBrains analysis shows teams lose up to 20% of weekly time to inefficiencies. Organizations using outdated CI/CD demonstrate monthly or quarterly releases instead of daily deployments. Elite teams deploy 208 times more frequently than peers, with lead times reduced from months to days.
The 208x deployment frequency gap illustrates how tooling choices cascade into organizational outcomes. Teams releasing quarterly face different risk profiles than those shipping multiple times daily. The former must batch changes carefully, creating complex releases harder to debug. Conversely, teams with fast pipelines can isolate changes and recover quickly from failures. This operational divergence compounds over time, creating competitive advantage.
“Developer experience directly correlates with engineering performance, which in turn drives competitive advantage,” noted Dmitrii Korovin of JetBrains. “Talented engineers leave organizations where they spend more time fighting infrastructure than building products.”
For a team of ten developers earning $100,000 each, saving three hours per week through better CI/CD tools could yield $75,000+ in annual savings.
The Internet Explorer of CI
Duncan offers a memorable comparison: “GitHub Actions is the Internet Explorer of CI. It ships with the thing.” This default status explains market dominance that outpaces product quality.
Multiple startups now exist specifically to fix GitHub Actions performance. Third-party runner providers like Namespace, BuildJet, RunsOn, Ubicloud, and Blacksmith offer considerably faster alternatives.
BetterStack analysis shows slower Azure hardware in GitHub’s default runners compared to newer chips used by competitors. Namespace offers the fastest CPU performance among tested runners. BuildJet pricing is roughly half of GitHub Actions rates.
The emergence of a specialized runner ecosystem signals market dysfunction. When multiple venture-backed startups build businesses addressing fundamental platform deficiencies, it indicates the incumbent has stopped investing in core user experience.
Microsoft could address these complaints by upgrading Azure hardware, yet the third-party market flourishes. This dynamic creates a tax on GitHub Actions users: either pay the performance penalty of default runners or add complexity managing external providers.
Duncan says that Buildkite represents what CI should feel like. Other early adopters agree. One early BuildKite customer described the platform as “lovely, very ergonomic, and gives you so much control.”
Community discussions on Hacker News reveal mixed reception to Duncan’s critique, with one developer defending their migration from CircleCI while another found GitHub Actions acceptable compared to Bitbucket and GitLab.
What Teams Can Do
Engineering leaders facing pipeline pain have several options. Tactical improvements include switching to faster third-party GitHub Actions runners for immediate speed gains.
Strategic alternatives involve migrating to platforms like Buildkite or CircleCI, which focus on speed and developer productivity with flexible resource management. Alternatively, teams staying within GitHub Actions can implement aggressive caching and parallelization strategies.
The decision between tactical optimization and strategic migration depends on organizational appetite for change. Third-party runners offer the fastest path to improvement; teams can see speed gains within days. However, platform migration requires substantial upfront investment but eliminates fundamental limitations of the GitHub Actions architecture. For teams with strong GitHub dependencies, aggressive caching may represent the pragmatic middle path.
For teams experiencing monthly or quarterly release cycles rather than continuous deployment, the answer to whether convenience justifies productivity losses may determine whether they remain competitive. The cost of inaction compounds as competitors with better tooling ship faster and capture market share.
The next deployment delay is already building in some engineering team’s pipeline. For developers currently watching yellow progress bars crawl across their screens at 3 AM while product launches loom, the decision cannot come soon enough. Their careers hang in the balance, torn between loyalty to teams they respect and the daily frustration of tools that waste their creative energy.
Engineering leaders face a deadline measured in quarters, not years. Each sprint spent wrestling with slow pipelines pushes top talent closer to exit interviews. Each quarter of delayed releases gives competitors time to capture market share. The teams that act this quarter will enter 2027 with streamlined workflows and energized developers. Those who wait will face the same choice next year, only with more technical debt, more frustrated engineers, and fewer options.
As Duncan reminds us, GitHub Actions dominates because it ships with the platform, not because it serves developers well. The question is how long engineering leaders will let convenience override the productivity of the people building their products.
