I love BuildKite. It might seem obvious now but I feel like BK had two key ideas -- fully declarative pipelines and a hybrid SaaS control plane / customer-managed workers concept that made it so much easier to deploy into large enterprises. That combined with a UI that was clear and a pleasure to work with.

I do wonder how BK will continue in a world that's increasingly dominated by GitHub and and other integrated solutions, but I hope as long as there's a market for quality tools, BK will survive and thrive.

My last company were buildkite customers and I was a champion for buildkite. Their offering was superb, and we loved it. This story pretty succinctly explains why we left buildkite - they chased enterprise billing to their success, and left the smaller companies behind. We had built our entire org around buildkite pipelines - using them for everything, because it was a convenient way to run tasks. We had 60 people who weee considered users. On their current pricing that would be $1800/month just for licenses which is nothing for a large company but it was the same cost as the hardware we ran the tasks on, and that wouldn’t fly. We left for team city which still had a viable middle ground for smaller companies.

Its a pity because it shows that there’s just so much more money by not catering to tens like ours

> In 2019 we raised a Series A of $28 million. The reason we did that was because I wanted to buy a house.

Haha, love it.

An inspirational story for sure!

I evaluated Buildkite at a previous job, and I came to these conclusions.

1. Buildkite is probably the best commercial, off-the-shelf CI system right now, in terms of providing all the correct building blocks at the correct level of abstraction. 2. The impact of your CI system itself being good or bad is tiny in comparison to everything else in your end-to-end CI workflow. Far more important are your own CI scripts and what they run. A distant second is the observability tooling around your CI. 3. It's hard to justify the per-seat pricing of Buildkite, as a separate line item, when whatever CI offering your source control host bundles in will suffice.

I used to really like buildkite, but their pricing has gotten kind of wild. Guess they are only chasing large cap orgs these days.

Buildkite is awesome, by far the best CI product and with an amazing team.

> The products I built with Claude are worse than without them because I use programming as a way to think and interact with the problem. When you're coding, you're deeply invested in the problem you're solving, getting intimate with the problem. With AI tools, it's surface level. It's a one-night stand with a problem versus a deep and meaningful relationship.

A very interesting insight about AI coding. It gets at the theory building part of programming, which is much harder to do when just supervising an AI in my experience. On the other hand, I am so much faster that it's hard not to use AI for coding. Interested to see what they come up with!