Carbon

What it costs the planet to ship a feature here, measured for every request that went live, using the Software Carbon Intensity method (ISO/IEC 21031:2024).

"g CO₂e" means grams of carbon dioxide equivalent: one unit that puts different greenhouse gases on the same scale as CO₂. Shipyard measures it to show what shipping each feature costs the planet.

Per shipped feature, average of 15

13.1 g CO₂e

Up to 112.0 g if AI model calls cost ten times our estimate. About 22 minutes of CI and 79 model calls each.

CI runners
1.88 g, 14%
AI model calls
10.99 g, 84%
Hardware
0.26 g, 2%

What the design avoided

Routing decisions made in plain code, not by an AI model

360

About 50.1 g CO₂e avoided across these features.

Requests declined at triage, before any code was written

About 125.0 g CO₂e avoided: each one cost a triage run instead of the full build.

Every launched feature

Feature	CI	Agent runs	g CO₂e
#41 Add a copy link button to each request's page	22.7 min	3 (83 calls)	13.77
#37 Add a short welcome line at the top of the roadmap	20.4 min	3 (55 calls)	9.65
#31 Show the total number of requests at the top of the roadmap	28.6 min	3 (152 calls)	23.94
#32 Add a link to the carbon page in the changelog	25.9 min	3 (72 calls)	12.55
#30 Improve #29: Add a static French overview page	21.4 min	3 (62 calls)	10.71
#29 Add a static French overview page	22.6 min	3 (73 calls)	12.37
#25 Prevent a repeat of incident #24: add a regression test	13.0 min	3 (90 calls)	13.79
#21 Add a short FAQ about how the agents work	29.9 min	5 (114 calls)	18.78
#20 Prevent a repeat of incident #19: add a regression test	8.5 min	2 (42 calls)	6.67
#17 Prevent a repeat of incident #15: add a regression test	20.9 min	3 (53 calls)	9.41
#13 Prevent a repeat of incident #12: add a regression test	27.0 min	3 (52 calls)	9.88
#6 Show the request count on the roadmap filters page title	17.6 min	3 (57 calls)	9.65
#2 Show how many requests each stage holds	21.1 min	4 (65 calls)	11.11
#3 Add a search box to the changelog	30.3 min	7 (157 calls)	24.81
#5 Show the date each request was filed	17.6 min	3 (58 calls)	9.79

Serving a page

Every visit has a cost too. The pipeline measures what each page transfers on every release and applies the Sustainable Web Design Model v4: 122 g CO₂e per GB.

Page	First visit	Repeat visit	mg CO₂e, first visit
/	15.0 kB	4.0 kB	1.82
/roadmap	16.1 kB	5.2 kB	1.96
/changelog	13.1 kB	2.2 kB	1.60
/carbon	14.9 kB	3.9 kB	1.81
/incidents	13.1 kB	2.2 kB	1.60
/requests/1	13.6 kB	2.6 kB	1.65

The live roadmap checks for changes every 20 seconds. When nothing changed, the answer is an empty "not modified" reply; when something did, 3.5 kB, so an hour of watching costs at most about 76 mg CO₂e. Pages are compressed, styles and scripts are cached for a year, and the pipeline fails any change that makes a first visit heavier than 50 kB, so agents can't quietly bloat the site.

How it's measured

SCI = (E × I + M) per R

R, the unit: One feature request that reached production.
E, energy: Runner time of every pipeline the feature caused, read from GitLab: agent runs, merge request pipelines and the pipeline that deployed it. Each runner has 2 vCPUs and 8 GB, drawing 8.92 W at 50% utilisation, including a PUE of 1.1. AI model calls are estimated at one per 5 seconds of agent run time, 0.24 Wh each.
I, grid intensity: 579.44 g CO₂e per kWh, location-based, for Google Cloud us-east1 where GitLab's runners run. The same value is assumed for model inference, whose location isn't published.
M, embodied emissions: The runner's share of the server's manufacturing footprint: 1200 kg CO₂e per 96-vCPU server over a 4-year life.
Outside the boundary: Serving visitors, because it grows with traffic, not with shipping. It's measured separately, per page view, above.
Serving, per page view: Sustainable Web Design Model v4: bytes transferred × energy per GB for data centres, networks and devices, operational and embodied. The data-centre share uses Montréal's grid (11 g CO₂e per kWh), where the site runs; networks, devices and all embodied energy use the global average (494 g).