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.

Long-term GitHub users have grown increasingly frustrated by its struggle to cope with exponential growth in pull requests, automation and monorepos https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/?ref=thestack.technology driven by developers adopting coding agents, which in turn has exposed with the scale at which the service now runs. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/addressing-githubs-recent-availability-issues-2/?ref=thestack.technology architectural decisions that haven’t kept up When former HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto announced https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-leaving-github?ref=thestack.technology 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 Buildkite for 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. https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2049240538965278927?ref=thestack.technology 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. Get the full story: Subscribe for free Join peers managing over $100 billion in annual IT spend and subscribe to unlock full access to The Stack’s analysis and events. Subscribe now https://www.thestack.technology/membership/ Already a member? Sign in https://www.thestack.technology/signin/