Question wording
The survey included one open-ended question, asked after the closed-ended items and before the demographic items. A response was not required.
Q14. What, if anything, would you want GitHub to do to help developers reduce the environmental impact of their software? [Open text]
Selection of responses
The responses below are illustrative, not representative. They are not weighted, coded, or counted, and readers should not infer from their number or arrangement how widely any view is held among GitHub users. Systematic coding of the full set of open-ended responses is outside the scope of this report.
Responses are reproduced verbatim, including original spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. They are grouped below by the theme each response raises; several responses address more than one theme, and the groupings are descriptive only.
Measurement and visibility of environmental impact
“I would like GitHub to provide tools that help developers measure the environmental impact of their software, recommend ways to improve code efficiency, and share best practices for sustainable software development. It would also be helpful to integrate energy-efficiency metrics into CI/CD workflows and promote open-source projects focused on sustainability.”
“Provide built-in tooling in GitHub Actions/CI to estimate the energy and carbon footprint of workflows and repositories, plus documentation on best practices for writing more efficient code.”
“At least big open source projects should have access to tools that analyze the software and try to come with a score of how energy efficient they are. I bet this is really hard to do and would have different meetings for different people, but would be a start.”
“There is a ton of wasted energy in the development and deployment of inefficient and unwanted software. The energy and environmental impacts are completely obscured from the developers as they are abstracted away. Highlighting the energy and environmental impacts to the development community needs more attention. Thank you.”
Compute waste in CI/CD and GitHub Actions
“Run data centers on renewable energy. Recommend or pre-suggest running tasks on off-peak times. Delay running non-critical CI/CD actions if they are wasteful/peak time/or have a pattern of not changing or change is minor (e.g. documentation change, do we need to run the unit tests?)”
“Find better ways to reduce unnecessary GitHub Actions runs (many are duplicated or run even when there are no code changes that meaningfully need to run them). Discourage overuse or misuse of AI where a more conventional process would be adequate.”
“Personally, my stance on using AI has shifted as others have compared the amount of CI/CD that runs on a tool like GitHub Actions. Being able to have a metric or someway to compare usage would be helpful for awareness and opportunities to address wasteful processes. Particularly as it relates to energy use and climate change.”
More efficient AI, and restraint in how AI is used
“Give me more efficient AI models. I don’t care about frontier models. I care about local AI. I care about efficient AI. I care about low-power electronics and general purpose computing. Promote more efficient web tool kits. Promote more efficient CI/CD strategies. Sponsor projects that enable sustainable computing.”
“I think development and research are really the only appropriate uses of LLMs. Certainly we do not need every rando on the internet asking CoPilot if it’s going to rain tomorrow or what internal temperature to cook chicken to. I don’t know how github could help with that.”
“Writing efficient code. Using AI efficiently and utilizing open source as opposed to LLM models. Utilizing green energy sources that reduce our carbon footprint. Implement the use of carbon-aware libraries in our current programing languages.”
Infrastructure commitments and developer education
“Back up your talk of eco concerns with concrete actions and transparent policies. Commit to only supporting and utilizing ethically sustainable data centers, who in turn use: recycled, closed loop water supply, green/renewable energy sources, transparent supply chain policies, etc.”
“Analyze codebases and suggest sustainable coding practices. Float open source projects to the top suggestion when they meet specific sustainability criteria. Help train the current and future generations of developers in how to architect and design for sustainability.”
Skepticism about the scale of developer-level impact
“The reality is we can do everything in our power to offset carbon emissions, then major powers can start a war and unleash tons of greenhouse gasses and pollutants into the air and completely undo all that progress. We’re tripping over metaphorical dollars to pick up nickels in greenhouse gas reduction by focusing on how much electricity a line of code uses.”