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".
They have SDKs in many languages, not just Go. I use the python one. And they use code, not a DSL.