Local CI in the agentic world

Not too much to say other than I've started to run into rough edges with build scripting that does not scale when more than a couple of agents are running local testing. I think maybe I finally noticed because I'm running on a MacBook Neo but I had three agents running their commit hooks which included local gosec and govulncheck runs, and my machine crawled to a standstill while I was watching a YouTube video.

Did some spelunking and saw Go processes, and realized that my normal setups for local testing and traditional linting weren't particularly aware of a world where 5-10 agents were running in the same project, in separate worktrees. A handful of them roughly finishing at the same time locked my system up.

I've always enjoyed and deeply valued being able to run our CI checks and as much testing as we could manage locally before a push is made to our centralized git. Depending on how aggressively you're pushing, or have auto-job cancelling if a new push comes in, you could just be spinning up builds for large systems for no good reason. Waste not, and use your local machine where a local build process until now was really single threaded on local machines. You the human wer probably only running your set of git commit hooks once before ultimately pushing, so you were fine.

But now your scripting needs to be aware of multiple agents on that same system potentially, that sucks. Even more reasons that I want more remote agent options, similar to how Cloudflare Computer can help with providing a temporary computing space. You're then just going to pull from a pool of shared compute, and we're kind of back to the VDI days of old.

Not sure where the balance is. I think having something that works mainly in the cloud, but can be synced back pretty instantaneously to local so things can be run locally in case of failure somewhere upstream. It makes me think of Git for the VM, where the snapshot is fast deltas and the ability to stream snapshots and whatever the last one you get is the one that is hot reloaded locally, probably way too hard of a problem.

Anyways I need a lock file for the big expensive tasks.