Lots of bugs

[pbrianmackey]

about 50% or more of the content doesn't work and I have to use AI just to get it working at the baseline. Sucks we have to burn up a ton of tokens to do this training, I ended up having to upgrade to a paid account just because the training burned up all my tokens. Overall, the time estimates are way off. I suggest this course takes at least twice as long to complete as stated, especially given all the problems I ran into. Overall, informative...but too many bugs. I ended up sidetracked and lost sight of key points.

[a-a-ron]

@pbrianmackey thanks for taking the time to share this feedback — I’m sorry to hear you ran into so many issues. That definitely isn’t the experience we want learners to have.

• To help us properly investigate and address this, could you provide a bit more detail? Specifically:
• Which GitHub Skills exercise or module were you working through?
• Which steps or sections weren’t functioning as expected?
• What specific errors or bugs did you encounter?
• At what point did you need to rely on AI to move forward?

Right now, we don’t have enough information on the exact exercise or the nature of the bugs to reproduce or troubleshoot the issues. If you can share more specifics (screenshots, error messages, or step numbers would be especially helpful), we can dig in and work toward a fix.

We also appreciate the feedback on time estimates — once we better understand the blockers you experienced, we can reassess whether adjustments are needed.

Looking forward to your follow-up

[pbrianmackey]

Thanks for the response

At the time of this comment I have completed:

Responsible AI with GitHub Copilot – 15 min
Introduction to GitHub Copilot – 19 min
Introduction to prompt engineering with GitHub Copilot – 30 min
Introduction to Copilot Spaces – 31 min
Using advanced GitHub Copilot features – 22 min
Management and customization considerations with GitHub Copilot – 30 min
Developer use cases for AI with GitHub Copilot – 49 min
Develop unit tests using GitHub Copilot tools – 1 hr 7 min

Building applications with GitHub Copilot agent mode – 50 min
Accelerate development with GitHub Copilot coding agent – 35 min
Introduction to MCP Server – 35 min
Leveling up code reviews and pull requests with GitHub Copilot – 35 min

And tomorrow I will do:
Building applications with GitHub Copilot agent mode – 50 min
Get started with GitHub Copilot – 1 hr 49 min
Generate documentation using GitHub Copilot tools – 1 hr 8 min
Implement code improvements using GitHub Copilot tools – 1 hr 20 min

I didn't note every single problem. This was 17 hours of training over the past 2 days. I can tell you that some of the courses were flat out broken right from the get go. I had at least 2 that I had to ask AI why the app would not start and it had to write code to get the things just to launch (this was BEFORE I did any work. And yes these apps were suppoesd to be in a working state at the start as that was part of the documentation). There were just so many issues I can't imagine it would be hard to reproduce if someone just tried it.

What specific errors or bugs did you encounter?

• Apps failed to start that were supposed to be in a working state.
• The first lesson Copilot wouldn't respond to anything. It started working after I clicked "[Something??} MCP" that it kept pumping out and just hanging indefinitely.
• Ran out of tokens so just couldn't even finish the content. Had to upgrade to a premium account. Even more frustrating, my employer requires this training AND blocks GitHub Actions so I couldn't use my employer account for this training at all. GitHub actions was required in the first lesson. So then I had to start over again too.
• One of the later lessons just stopped detecting my changes. I ended up having to re-run the PR review for Co-pilot which triggered the action to finally get it to review my pushes to make a correction required by the app.
• One of the lessons I had to downgrade Drupal to v4.1 b/c it wouldn't let me use v4.1.7. This was kind-a silly blockage.
• Overall, it has taken me 17 hours to do what was reported to take me about 7 hours.
• The last lesson didn't update my README.MD that the lesson was complete. In the actions it just said "skipped" and it was not re-runnable.

At what point did you need to rely on AI to move forward?

Basically anytime I got stuck I just hammered AI to have it figure out where something was off.

I can take more specific notes tomorrow. I didn't expect to even have the opportunity to give any feedback. I just had a really hard time and I saw this option 2/3 of the way through my training so here I am.