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
Less 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
Feb 5, 2026 05:35Yes, 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.
