alt Hacker NewsI tend to disagree with this as it seems like an ad for Nix/Buildkite...
If your CI invocations are anything more than running a script or a target on a build tool (make, etc.) where the real build/test steps exist and can be run locally on a dev workstation, you're making the CI system much more complex than it needs to be.
CI jobs should at most provide an environment and configuration (credentials, endpoints, etc.), as a dev would do locally.
This also makes your code CI agnostic - going between systems is fairly trivial as they contain minimal logic, just command invocations.
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Hey, at least you didn't pull the reflexive, "this must be AI slop!" comment that seems quite prevalent on HN lately.
This so much - I remember migrating from one CI system to another a few years ago - I had built all of our pipelines to pull in some secrets and call a .sh file that did all the heavy lifting. The migration had a few pain points but was fairly easy. Meanwhile, the teams who had created their pipelines with the UI and broken them up in to multiple steps were not happy at all.
Can 100% confirm this is not an ad (at least not for Buildkite) and was a lovely surprise to read for the team.