Comment by twistedpair
1 day ago
Lack of a local runner is my biggest peeve. Any novel GHA workflow creation results in a PR with 100 commits, until you can finally sort out all the non-obvious idiosyncrasies. For any modestly complex workflow, I move everything to a bash or TS file and call that, and then you can use _coding tools_ and a _local_ dev/eval loop.
How funny that GitHub Actions' lack of tools forces you to make a bunch of billed cloud runs with GitHub for workflow edits. I'm sure their PMs are very concerned about this trend.
A local runner would certainly help, but only to some extend. When you need to support multiple OS (Windows, Linux, macOS) and architecture (x64, arm64), not everything can be tested locally.
Try writing a regression test for your Github Action.. I'll wait.
It's a pretty ridiculously half-baked feature. But a lot of these devtools are--it's arguably even worse in the observability vertical. You have all these metrics and dashboards you're using to make critical business and operational decisions yet no way to actually ensure they're telling you what you think they are. Clown shit.
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