AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

Here's my constant question:

Everyone's going so fast that they keep hitting walls. Review, CI, product asking for things, whatever.

Why have we not seen an improvements in products?

While every post and thread feels like a 90's wall street office, the new android and iphone ship with fewer features than usual. No indie guys come up with a linux-sized alternative OS. Switch 2 remains unhacked. Windows takes 3 seconds to show the right click menu.

Is everyone just running full speed in circles or something?

In my case it's not the CI that's the bottleneck. It's the human testing side. Does it work, sure. But does it actually do the thing we want (and more importantly) does it do it in a way our customers will understand and actually like?

> Moving our workloads off GitHub Actions to third-party runners with faster CPUs, higher-performance storage, and better cache infrastructure gave us faster machines to run the same pipeline on

Yeah, was not surprised to read this. Actions is convenient if you already use GitHub, but it can also be pretty slow. Given reliability is also a major issue with GitHub these days I expect to see more orgs moving to different pipelines

Good thing Linear has been finished for a long time doesn't need more features, so AI coding can go slow. Oh damn, it's busy becoming the next Jira :(

If you can pay the setup cost, Bazel will get you build times ~10s with a warm cache for even massive projects.

Agentic Coding has been a huge strain on CI, I have been using Bazel to improve our build times and ultimately building customized runners to improve our CI

Anyways great blog post from linear team a lot to learn from it

My take: it seems like systems should become smaller, more isolated, and contract-oriented.

I have been a long time proponent of monoliths, but it seems like agents would be happier with smaller, more isolated services. The more isolated, the better. Contracts between the service components only. Then it can iterate internally as long as it satisfies the contract. If it needs to, it can version the contract and keep iterating.

I wonder if the GitHub actions outages we keep seeing is due to themselves making self-hosted runners paid, hence bringing broke/cheap users back from hosted runners to their garbage infra.Meanwhile I'm running my Codeberg Actions on the free Oracle ARM machine 2 cores 12GB ram (previously 4 cores 24GB) and way more reliable. Keep winning bozos.

Edit: After second thought, I guess "alternative runner" providers still have to pay the self-hosted tax. So M$ actually saves and makes money by not scaling their infra and driving people to alternative providers they can tax freely. Actual geniuses.

I call this moment "the Great CI Bottleneck of 2026". Here are my thoughts on it: https://dagger.io/blog/the-great-ci-bottleneck-of-2026/

Speed up CI and the next bottleneck just moves to deploy and rollback, which do not scale the same way.

(Disclosure: I'm a cofounder of RWX) For anybody wanting to solve similar problems and considering Bazel, take a look RWX. It's built around the same concepts of content-based caching and graph-based task execution, but it's far more runtime agnostic and easier to adopt. https://rwx.com

vitest load balancing on test duration times instead of by file would be a nice performance win

I just feel apps like linear are increasingly getting in the way of full send agentic development where sub agent orchestration is done through agent to agent messaging, work trees, on demand git restructuring and epoch specific coordination plains, often .md files. The smaller the human component of total product development gets, the more this may be the case.

My recent winnowwallet.com still has build times of over 10 minutes. I'm convinced the agent really wants build times around 5m to move at a quick pace. Also to not drive me insane. It took a ton of work to get it down from 45 minutes because my tests launch a full version of the app, and walk it through major usecases while recording video and screenshots. I then use AI to qa this. It also generates its webpage this way. All from CI/CD

I cannot believe we are in 2026 and CI/CD hasn't evolved enough to even consider hot updates. Burn your CI/CD pipelines to the ground and start over again without any of the slop. Don't let anyone who calls themselves DevOps Engineers design it again, only people who are System Administrators.

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Maybe I'm alone in this, but as someone who is in tech, I don't know what CI is, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect it to have an expansion within the article the first time you use it...

AI is in the cultural zeitgeist, but you gotta expand most other things at least once.