You're 100% right IMHO about the convergence of powerful CI pipelines and full build systems. I'm very curious what you'll think if you try Dagger, which is my tool of choice for programming the convergence of CI and build systems. (Not affiliated, just a happy customer)
So, it sounded interesting but they have bet too hard on the "developer marketing" playbook of "just give the minimum amount of explanation to get people to try the stuff".
For example, there is a quick start, so I skip that and click on "core concepts". That just redirects to quick start. There's no obvious reference or background theory.
If I was going to trust something like this I want to know the underlying theory and what guarantees it is trying to make. For example, what is included in a cache key, so that I know which changes will cause a new invocation and which ones will not.
Hello, Dagger employee here.
Thanks so much for taking a look and sharing your feedback! We've heard this feedback in the past and are working on a big docs change that should make this whole experience a lot better for folks that are new to dagger.
https://devel.docs.dagger.io/getting-started/concepts
This should land in the coming weeks.
I absolutely don't understand what it does from the website. (And there is way too much focus on "agents" on the front page for my tastes, but I guess it's 2025)
edit: all the docs are about "agents"; I don't want AI agents, is this for me at all?