Comment by ibejoeb
2 hours ago
What problem is github solving that has led it to become critical infrastructure for so many? Is it that everyone is remote and VPNs are too much of a hassle to give everyone access to a build server? Is the serving as the authoritative auth for development services? Does it provide better compliance reporting? It just isn't apparent to me what github offers that you can't get elsewhere with at the same cost and effort. I've been in some pretty large orgs with distributed personnel, but this just hasn't ever been a problem.
GitHub solved the original "code collaboration" problem, and now it's a default easy way to outsource repo management. It also has the most integrations. A lot of companies grew up using GitHub.
GitHub was, once upon a time, quite stable. Things have changed: more features, more usage, and automated agents.
I know what it does, but why is it such a problem that Actions is down? I think you did kind of answer it: "A lot of companies grew up using GitHub," i.e., they are using it as infrastructure by default, not because it does something that otherwise can't be done.
It’s well integrated into massively underpriced agentic coding (and noncoding) workflows, I doubt there’s much more reason than that. The hip thing to do now is hold all your docs in github instead of notion so your agent can traverse them locally
GitHub Actions is the build server. You could use any other but it is convenient indeed to have it integrated in your repository hosting service.