“What I've found is that as we have become more and more agentic, you're starting to see strain on the CI/CD pipeline and particularly on test environments, the ability to spin up enough resources. … As we scale to doing more and more in parallel, and every engineer maybe has 10, 15, 20, we get to 100 agents working in parallel, having all of those environments that are able to be spun up really, really quickly and spun down equally as quickly, backed with real data… That's not trivial.”
Ship It Weekly - DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud Engineering News · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
Context
Asked whether AI has made CI/CD pipelines more robust, Packer says it has been more of a strain than a help. Agents need to run and test their own code, which means many fast, disposable environments.
Transcript
…that the quality has gone up. Not just the quality in terms of number of bugs and defects and those kinds of things, but the quality of the experience. How well are we hitting the mark in terms of getting the right feature for the right customer? That to me is actually the more exciting part.
Yeah, it's not just more features trying to actually make sure it's the right features. Internally, are you noticing more robust CI CD because platform teams have this tool now? We're able to put more checks in place or like how is it helping internally on the actual engineering side?
…I think we all know at this point, one of the most important factors in agents doing a good job building software is their ability to go in and test and run that software and see for themselves, validate themselves. Well, that requires us to create multiple environments. In the early days of Agentic coding, usually that looked like every engineer having one or two environments on their machine. As we scale to doing more and more in parallel, and every engineer maybe has 10, 15, 20, we get to 100 agents working in parallel, having all of those environments that are able to be spun up really, really quickly and spun down equally as quickly, backed with real data, particularly when we're talking about use cases that really involve large amounts of customer data. That's not trivial. And so I would say, you know, I don't want to sound like I think our CI CD process has gotten worse, but I would say AI is definitely challenging the volume that we can do. And so there's been a lot of effort to improve the CI CD pipeline so that we can scale to the volume of…
Are there data privacy concerns? I'm assuming, like Bamboo, you guys are dealing with PII. Is that a concern when using AI?
Yeah, no, it's a huge concern. It's something that we take really, really seriously. You know, HR Data, Mid-Career some of the most sensitive data out there. And we also have a payroll product. So thousands of people get their paychecks through us. There's not a lot that's more sensitive than your…
Okay, so now I'm curious for like the senior engineer, if producing code itself becomes dramatically easier, what actually becomes more valuable in a senior engineer?
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