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[ARTICLE · art-59695] src=thestack.technology ↗ pub= topic=developer-tools verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Why devs turn to Buildkite in the AI era

Developers are increasingly turning to Buildkite for CI/CD as GitHub struggles with exponential growth in pull requests and automation driven by AI coding agents. Buildkite, used by Airbnb, PagerDuty, Reddit, Shopify, and Uber, offers a dynamic, developer-centric experience that contrasts with GitHub's architectural limitations.

read1 min views1 publishedJul 14, 2026
Why devs turn to Buildkite in the AI era
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Long-term GitHub users have grown increasingly frustrated by its struggle to cope with exponential growth in pull requests, automation and monorepos driven by developers adopting coding agents, which in turn has exposed

with the scale at which the service now runs. __architectural decisions that haven’t kept up__When former HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto announced in April he was moving his open source

[project off GitHub and would probably use](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty?ref=thestack.technology)

__Ghostty terminal__[(which he called “awesome”) for CI/CD, there was](https://buildkite.com/home/?ref=thestack.technology)

Buildkitefor an area of devops often seen as slow, complex, fragile and frustrating. Airbnb, PagerDuty, Reddit, Shopify and Uber depend on Buildkite – as do Bazel, Bun, Elastic, Rails and NATS: open source developers seem to love it too.

an unusual outpouring of enthusiasm## Dynamic and developer centric

Buildkite started as a personal project; the original founder wanted a developer experience more like Heroku than Jenkins. Much of the original focus was about giving developers more control over software delivery, down to CI/CD pipelines and testing. That didn't stop platform teams at larger organisations like Shopify and PagerDuty from picking up Buildkite, often as an internal standard to replace multiple CI/CD systems chosen by individual teams.

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