We were spending over $7,000 a month on Blacksmith, and our runs still took too long.
That's not a complaint about Blacksmith. Faster runners do what they promise. But they made us see what every CI provider sells: minutes. GitHub Actions, GitLab, Bitbucket Pipelines, Azure Pipelines, TeamCity, Blacksmith. Faster minutes, cheaper minutes, more of them. None of them make your pipeline need fewer.
So the waste stays. The flaky test that fails one run in twenty. The suite that runs three tests checking the same thing. The job that rebuilds everything because one file changed. The red main that nobody owns. You pay for all of it, on every run, and the bill grows with the codebase.
Agents made it urgent
Coding agents open more pull requests than people ever did, and every one of them goes through CI. CI used to be a cost of shipping. Now it's the bottleneck, and the bill. If your agents spend their time waiting on a ten-minute pipeline, you're paying twice: once for the agent, once for the wait.
CI should improve itself
Kaizen means change for the better, one small step at a time, every day. That's what we think CI should do. Not a one-off migration or a consultant's report that's stale in a month: a pipeline that keeps iterating with you.
Kaizen CI watches your runs, finds the bottleneck that costs the most, and opens the fix as a pull request. It proves the change didn't make anything else slower or flakier, and then it finds the next one. When the numbers say it's worth it, it modernises your stack: build caching, affected-only runs, tools like moon. When they don't, it says so.
Where we're going
Imagine CI that finishes in under a minute. Imagine CI at half the price. Today you pick one, and you pay for the trade-off. We think you should get both: CI that runs in under a minute and costs less than you pay today. A pipeline that gets faster and cheaper every cycle is how we get there.
And because a lean, reliable test suite is one you can trust, it's also how you show your software is tested before it reaches production, every time.
改善. Change for the better, every cycle.