Dagger founder: the Great CI Bottleneck of 2026 is a software problem, not hardware
msharmas · x · 2026-09-29
Dagger founder and Docker creator Solomon Hykes argues the "Great CI Bottleneck of 2026" is here:
- Coding agents now produce code faster than CI can process it, and traditional CI platforms are imploding
- He pushes back on the popular view (pushed by hardware vendors) that faster machines will fix it: "run shell scripts on VMs" architectures only scale by buying more or bigger VMs — throwing money at a software problem
- In the human-written-code era, small teams had small footprints and big teams could afford the waste; at agentic scale, the economics become catastrophic and no machine will be fast enough
- The fix is a new software stack for CI that makes workloads smarter and less wasteful. Dagger is his 7-year open-source attempt at exactly that, whose biggest obstacle has been community apathy
His contrarian take: AI coding's next bottleneck isn't models or compute — it's the CI pipeline itself.
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