Comment by jillesvangurp

Keeping it simple is always a good idea. I've been pretty happy with gh actions lately. I've seen everything from hudson/jenkins, travis ci, git lab, etc. Most of that stuff is fine if you keep it simple. Building your software should be simple if you do it manually. If it is, it's easy to automate with CI.

The same goes for other tools: build tools (ant, maven, gradle, npm, etc.); Configuration systems (puppet, ansible, salt, etc.); Infrastructure provisioning (cloudformation, terraform, etc.); other containerization and packaging tools (packer, docker, etc.).

Stick to what they are good at. Don't overload them with crap outside the scope of what they do (boiling oceans, lots of conditional logic, etc.). And consider whether you need them at all. Write scripts for all the rest. My default is a simple bash script. Replacing a 2 line script with 100+ lines of yaml is a clear sign that something is wrong with what you are doing.

A consideration lately is not just automated builds but having agentic coding tools be able to work with your software. I just spent an afternoon nudging codex along to vibe code me a new little library. Mostly it's nailing it and I'm iterating with it on features, tests, documentation etc. It of course needs to be able to run tests to validate what it's doing. And it needs to be able to figure out how. The more complicated that is, the less likely it is to be useful.

CI and agentic coding have similar needs: simplicity and uniformity. If you have that, everything gets easier.

Anything custom and wonky needs to isolated and removed from the critical path. Or removed completely. Devops work is drudgery that needs to be minimized and automated. If it becomes most of what you do, you're doing it wrong. If an agentic coding system can figure out how to build and run your stuff, getting it to setup CI and deployment scripts is not that much of a leap in complexity.

After a few decades with this stuff, I have a low threshold for devops bullshit. I've seen that go sideways and escalate into months long projects to do god knows what a few times too often. Life is too short to deal with that endlessly. The point of automating stuff is so you can move on and do more valuable things. If automating it takes up all your time, something is very wrong.