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I built a visual node system for CI/CD that supports GitHub Actions

Details

External ID
46962217
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
A visual CI/CD system
Website domain
actionforge.dev
Launched
Feb. 10, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
18
Upvotes percentile
0.6711590296495957
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Hey HN,About a year ago I shared a first MVP of a visual node-based system for CI/CD pipelines that I've been very passionate about. I've been building on it since, and it's now live.I've always liked building pipelines and workflows, but I've never liked writing YAML for anything more than simple linear tasks. Branching, conditions, loops, or trying to just run certain things in parallel always gets messy. So I built Actionforge, a visual node system to tackle some of these pain points.Instead of writing YAML yourself, you build workflows as graphs. While Actionforge still uses YAML under the hood, the visual editor makes them much easier to maintain. These graphs also run natively on GitHub runners with no middleman. What used to take me hours of fiddling with indentation and string syntax, now only takes me minutes to create a full build pipeline.The editor comes with a visual debugger so you can run and troubleshoot workflows locally before deploying them.I dogfood it heavily, so Actionforge builds itself. Here's one of its graphs for GitHub Actions. https://www.actionforge.dev/exampleThe runner is written in Go, and is open source on GitHub (including GH Attestation and SBOM for full transparency).Would love to hear what you think. Happy building!

Enrichment

Theme
git and repository workflow tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
visual node system for ci/cd
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial While an interactive React Flow node canvas can be vibe coded, parsing, validating, bi-directionally compiling, and faithfully emulating the intricate runtime semantics of GitHub Actions workflows is non-trivial.

What it would actually take: Building a working visual GitHub Actions system requires a frontend node-graph editor (React Flow / Svelte Flow) paired with a precise AST parser and compiler that validates against the complete GitHub Actions schema, including matrix builds, conditionals, and composite actions. It also requires an execution runner layer (similar to nektos/act) with Docker daemon management to execute containers locally and stream step logs back in real time over WebSockets.

Discussion

No comments on this launch.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 131 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #49 of 132 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 98 days after the earliest competitor.

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