i replaced my entire CI with 80 lines of bash. it slaps.i replaced my entire CI with 80 lines of bash. it slaps.i replaced my entire CI with 80 lines of bash. it slaps.

i used to write CI pipelines in yaml. eight hundred lines of indented despair. nested anchors. shell snippets escaped six times. a job called 'maybe-deploy-if-tuesday'. then one day, on a long flight, i deleted all of it.

the manifesto, in one breath

"yaml is a configuration format. it is not, despite appearances, a programming language. when you find yourself programming in yaml you are not in the configuration business anymore. you are in the suffering business."

the entire ci, in 80 lines

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

stage() { echo; echo "::: $1"; }

stage "lint"     && shellcheck ./**/*.sh && ruff check .
stage "test"     && go test ./... && pytest -q
stage "build"    && make release
stage "sign"     && cosign sign-blob --yes dist/*.tar.gz
stage "publish"  && gh release create "v$(cat VERSION)" dist/*
# (80 lines once you handle caching, retries, and matrix builds)

of course it's not 80 lines anymore. it's 142. it does parallel matrix runs, caches between stages with a local mtime check, retries with backoff, and posts a summary to slack. it's still bash. it's still legible.

what you give up

the cloud provider's marketplace. nice green checkmarks in PRs (we have a tiny pr-status binary that does this, also 40 lines). free spinners. the ability to say 'yeah we use circleci'. all worth it. all worth it.