I wonder how many jiggawats of electricity get wasted every year by people using default github actions that always re-install dependencies. Surely copilot could handle that. I feel like it would trim a solid 30% off their total utilization
Feb 4, 2026 19:30Less than you'd think, but for weird reasons.
It's pretty clear GitHub does some local caching of packages regardless of language, and has been doing so for at least ~2-3 years.
I find that GitHub can do a "fresh" install of a package faster than most boxes I've seen.
Honestly, it's great.
The difference between downloading and unzipping a node_packages you already have & running npm ci every time is like <1m vs >3m once theres more than a few packages, that's big enough by itself. The kind of thing that should be in the default template
Yes, and, this pre-supposes there is a single default template.
If I were in GitHub's shoes I'd want to mitigate the cost even if people did things inefficiently.
They provide a fair number of samples for using caching and encourage it in many ways.
But don't see them rewriting anyone's workflow.
