alt Hacker NewsDagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev environments
Comments
The title says "dev environments". Can dagger be used for creatin dev environments, like devcontainers or https://www.jetify.com/docs/devbox/quickstart ?
I thought Dagger had/has a lot of potential to be "AWS-CDK for CI pipelines".
I.e. declaratively setup a web of CI / deployment tasks, based on docker, with a code-first DSL, instead of the morass of copy-pasted (and yes orbs) CircleCI yaml files we have strewn about our internals repos.
But their DSL for defining your pipelines is ... golang? Like who would pick golang as "a friendly language for setting up configs".
The underlying tech is technically language-agnostic, just as aws-cdk's is (you can share cdk constructs across TypeScript/Python), but it's rooted in golang as the originating/first-class language, so imo will never hit aws-cdk levels of ergonomics.
That technical nit aside, I love the idea; ran a few examples of it a year or so ago and was really impressed with the speed; just couldn't wrap my around "how can I make this look like cdk".
I loved the original promise of Dagger and it’s still 90% great.
But one flaw (IMO) that it can’t export artifacts and import into other steps without breaking the cache.
Eg if you provide monorepo as input, and then on some step narrow your build to one specific dir, then even when files change outside of that dir then caching still is invalidated.
Which makes it extremely verbose and maintenance nightmare to keep multiple narrow inputs and keep all those paths up to date.
And for those who may not know the founder of Dagger is the same guy who founded Docker - Solomon Hykes.
Wow, the comments are generally negative. That’s sad. I was about to create a POC to present to my team.
What else could be used to abstract away your CICD from the launcher (Jenkins, Argo Workflows, GitHub Actions, etc.)?
Anybody using it extensively? It doesn't seem to have made the splash I expected it to at launch
This seemed cool as it looked like a new CI/CD tool or IaC system.
Then... it wasn't. The more I read the less I ever want to see this again. The LLM train has got to end at some point.
If I understand correctly, this is essentially a more composable way to write Dockerfiles? That alone is a very welcome improvement. They would do themselves a big favor if they were more clear on that in their marketing, instead of boasting around the bush with all kinds of other terminology and claims of redefining foundations.
If I already have a Dockerfile that doesn’t need composition, how does this help me vs being a small cosmetic improvement over ”docker build” command line?
A lot of the comments here feel like they're disappointed that this is a "Docker with unnecessary LLM crap thrown in" when I think what they're really going for is more "LLM workflows with a higher degree of observability and sanity".
I think a more interesting point of comparison is the Claude Code Github Action, Co-Pilot code reviews, etc.
Curious if anyone in the thread has / is using windmill?
They don't seem to have jumped for AI hype (yet?)...
I might be getting old but the videos are too fast for me to understand. Why can't they just put the full command text and the output of it instead of a video.
Anybody used it?
Without the LLM bits, this is basically like Bazel or buck2, right?
I was interested in the beginning for CI/CD, but then they tried to take a kind of "AI-oriented" view in order to ride the AI wave, and the value prop of their tool was completely muddied up...
This looks interesting but I’m trying to understand it in more layman’s terms. Is it more about providing abstractions for llms to work within to do things?
why do i need this when we got docker? anyone mind explaining?
I think it started as some kind of CI/CD tools, then they jumped on the AI hype and they started to use it to make it possible to run agents in containers easily... perhaps to do automated actions on CI/CD pipelines that use agents (eg try to solve some minor bugs automatically when you push on a branch, etc)
Although I'm not sure if that's so much a value-added? It's not so hard to just create a container and launch an agent in it.
The whole interesting thing was to use actual programming languages for Docker build, which I think was what they initially tried to do, but now it's a bit incomprehensible... I guess conceptually Dagger relates to Dockerfile a bit like Pulumi related to Terraform?
Dagger was something I looked into two or so years ago before they got consumed by the LLM and AI agent hype, and while the promise of being able to run the exact CI workflows locally seemed excellent, it seemed that there's basically no way be a Dagger user without buying into their Dagger Cloud product.
I ended up opting for CUE and GitHub Actions, and I'm glad I did as it made everything much, much simpler.