Slow and flaky CI/CD pipelines

Using your own STT/TTS means a lot of bandwidth moving through wherever you run your test automation from. It's tricky to get the LLM-to-LLM prompts dialed in enough to avoid flaky tests.

ineptech · Oct 7, 2026 · story in “Show HN: VoiceGremlin, a SaaS tool for automated tests against AI phone agents”

That's a thing with AI-generated code. The lying machine happily reports that "boss, everything is clean, tests pass, code gate green", but once we need to build on top it's always "preexisting flaky tests, not related to this section" and trying to do commit --no-veriry before it's slapped on it's little robot hands twice.

Muromec · Oct 6, 2026 · comment in “Ephemeral Testing”

Again, this seems more like an indictment of the American medical system than kudos for AI. For the developers here, consider: "So our CI pipeline is super flaky, and it you have to restart it in a variety of non-intuitive ways.

ForHackernews · Oct 3, 2026 · comment in “Our AI Midwife”

Imagine prod deploys are down for 2 days why? Because GitHub actions keep failing...

minraws · Aug 15, 2026 · comment in “Cloudflare's AI Psychosis”

Why would I ever choose bash for writing anything slightly more complex than simple redirection, when I can do things in way better fashion with babashka. Why would I wrestle a YAML CI pipeline that only fails on push, when I can drive the whole thing from a babashka task file, run each step locally in the REPL, and actually debug it?

iLemming · Jul 17, 2026 · comment in “A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp”

To make up some numbers for illustrative purposes, if someone introduced four new flaky tests in the time it took to fully diagnose and clean up one, and then LLMs came and made everybody twice as productive, now in the same amount of time someone might introduce eight flaky tests while you fixed two, so you're falling behind twice as fast.

saghm · Jul 12, 2026 · comment in “Don't you mean extinct?”

My current job has me overseeing a few teams of engineers working on ~10+ y/o legacy software systems that have not been especially well maintained. As an example, one team had a completely broken CI pipeline due to numerous flaky tests.

SeanAnderson · May 1, 2026 · comment in “Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"”

Repo: https://github.com/semisse/subcat Curious if others deal with flaky tests in a similar way, or if you’ve found better approaches.

semisse · Apr 6, 2026 · comment in “SubCat: Stop babysitting your Pull Requests”

I built LucidShark after getting burned too many times by AI-generated code that looked fine locally but failed CI with security issues or broken dependencies. The frustrating part: the feedback loop is terrible.

PM_ME_YOUR_CAT · Mar 18, 2026 · comment in “Show HN: LucidShark - Quality pipeline for AI coding agents”

I definitely have 100% pass rate on our tests for most of the time (in master, of course). By "most of the time" I mean that on any given day, you should be able to run the CI pipeline 1000 times and it would succeed all of them, never finding a flaky test in one or more runs.

alkonaut · Mar 17, 2026 · comment in “What CI looks like at a 100-person team (PostHog)”

AI has made writing code 10x faster, but shipping is still painfully slow. The bottleneck has shifted downstream - to merge conflicts, flaky tests, inconsistent code quality, and dozens of other frictions that drain productivity and morale.

trunksuzieross · Mar 4, 2026 · comment in “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2026)”

You end up with brittle hacks, flaky tests, and a CI pipeline that breaks

kevin-au · Mar 1, 2026 · story in “Mock Wallet – Test Web3 Apps with Playwright, Humans, and AI Agents”

Keep screenshots/automation working while the MacBook lid is closed Main problem I wanted to solve: When a MacBook is in Clamshell / headless mode, desktop-dependent actions (especially screenshot pipelines) can become unreliable or fail.

xtongs · Feb 16, 2026 · story in “Keep screenshots/automation working while the MacBook lid is closed”

AI has made writing code 10x faster, but shipping is still painfully slow. The bottleneck has shifted downstream - to merge conflicts, flaky tests, inconsistent code quality, and dozens of other frictions that drain productivity and morale.

trunksuzieross · Feb 2, 2026 · comment in “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)”

Built this while working on astronomy data pipelines where we process terabyte-scale datasets. We kept hitting a frustrating pattern: libraries promised great performance, benchmarks looked solid, but our pipelines were mysteriously slow.

mtauraso · Jan 27, 2026 · comment in “Show HN: IOPS Profiler – Jupyter magic to measure I/O operations per second”

Because I was 'vibe coding' with LLMs, I had a long scrollback of cargo build failing repeatedly with ownership/borrow errors. 'Chris' (the forensic expert) reviewed that timestamped history to verify that I was genuinely struggling to compile a harmless display driver in a hotel room that morning, rather than deploying a pre-compiled malicious payload.

reutinger · Jan 23, 2026 · comment in “Show HN: The firmware that got me detained by Swiss Intelligence”

AI has made writing code 10x faster, but shipping is still painfully slow. The bottleneck has shifted downstream - to merge conflicts, flaky tests, inconsistent code quality, and dozens of other frictions that drain productivity and morale.

trunksuzieross · Jan 2, 2026 · comment in “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026)”

From this perspective this is a huge price jump, but self-hosting to save money can still work out. Honestly, GitHub Actions have been too flaky for me and I'm begrudgingly reaching for Jenkins again for new projects.

8organicbits · Dec 16, 2025 · comment in “Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions”

> The trick is to have warnings fail CI but not local builds Which is annoying because the CI pipeline can take like 10 minutes to do the build and then you need to re-commit after turning the warnings on locally.

FieryMechanic · Dec 9, 2025 · comment in “The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video]”

I built SentinelQA to make it easier for developers to understand why CI tests fail. Most pipelines fail for unclear reasons; huge logs, flaky tests, regressions and subtle changes that aren't obvious.

sentinelqa · Dec 4, 2025 · comment in “[dead]”

AI has made writing code 10x faster, but shipping is still painfully slow. The bottleneck has shifted downstream - to merge conflicts, flaky tests, inconsistent code quality, and dozens of other frictions that drain productivity and morale.

trunksuzieross · Dec 1, 2025 · comment in “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2025)”

Yet, every time these files change, an action workflow will build the same Docker image, but with new tags! I was tired of both waiting for long workflows as well as burning build minutes, so I thought about a solution to the problem: You want to be able to skip builds if everything ending up in the build context doesn't change.

9dev · Nov 8, 2025 · story in “Show HN: Avoid Docker builds in GH Actions if the context didn't change”