[evanharwin]

Appreciate both the clear feeling and nuanced take here!

It’s interesting, because it’s like the problem is partly that most of the CI offerings out there are at least a little bit gross, but also the vast number of mediocre CI offerings is a factor too.

It feels like it’d be easy to convince yourself that what you’ve built is better than everything that exists already, and hey, maybe it is! But personally I wonder if we really need is a step-change here, not an incremental improvement—something that really does make build and deploy easier, and changes how we all think about it too.

[mdaniel]

My life experience has been that answering the question is almost always a matter of "easier ... for whom ... to do what?" I think CI/CD systems often run up against the same problem that programming language adoption runs into: trying to be all things to all people for all problem domains is incredibly hard

Even what I mentioned about static typing I'm sure caused a blood-pressure spike in some readers, since some folks value the type safety and others consider it "line noise". Some people enjoy the double-quote free experience of yaml, others pound on their desk about the 7 ways to encode scalars and "but muh norway!!11"

But, taking our ragingly dumbass buildspec friend <https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/build...> as a concrete example, how in the holy hell did they invent some build language without conditionals?! I'm sure the answer is "well, for our Amazon-centric use case, you're holding it wrong" but for someone coming from GitLab CI and GitHub Actions which both have "skip this job if today is Tuesday" it's a pretty glaring oversight