Comment by kccqzy
The article quotes from Codeberg,
> Running CI/CD pipelines can use significant amounts of energy. As much as it is tempting to have green checkmarks everywhere, running the jobs costs real money and has environmental costs.
Honestly I think the mention of environmental costs has likely made users hesitant to sign up. Mentioning it costs real money is reasonable. Mentioning the environmental costs is not; the environmental harm is equivalent to the population buying a few dozen extra cars, which can easily be influenced by random marketing decisions by automakers and dealers.
In my experience reprimanding tech savvy people for the environmental costs of compute just doesn’t work. It’s far better to rephrase things into performance optimization problems, which naturally pique engineers’ interest.
Is it really that low an impact? A lot of the work performed in CI is duplicated (`apt update && apt install texlive-full` f.ex.), and thus there'd be a benefit to running it less often.
Consider also https://openssf.org/blog/2025/09/23/open-infrastructure-is-n... :
> Automated CI systems, large-scale dependency scanners, and ephemeral container builds, which are often operated by companies, place enormous strain on infrastructure. > These commercial-scale workloads often run without caching, throttling, or even awareness of the strain they impose.
...which implies that the load isn't negligible.