Building CI for the age of AI Agents with Aayush Shah
From Software Huddle by Software Huddle
July 22, 2025 · 1h 4m
About this episode
Aayush Shah discusses the challenges and innovations in Continuous Integration for AI agents with a focus on Blacksmith's approach to handling CI workloads.
Today's episode is with Aayush Shah. Aayush is one of the co-founders of Blacksmith, which is a CI compute platform. Basically, Blacksmith will run your GitHub Actions jobs faster and with more visibility with the standard GitHub Actions CI runners. The founding team has a fun background doing systems work at Cockroach and Faire, and they're taking on a big problem in running this massive CI fleet. The explosion in AI agents has really changed the CI world. CI is more useful than ever, as you want to be sure the changes from your agents aren't breaking your existing functionality. At the same time, there's a huge increase in demand and spikiness of CI workloads as developers can fire off multiple agents to work in parallel, each needing to run the CI suite before merging. Aayush talked about how they're handling this load and facilitating visibility into test failures. We also covered cloud economics. Aayush said the traditional cloud-based storage options don't work for them -- EBS and locally attached SSDs are too expensive for their workloads where they don't need the standard durability guarantees. He walks us through building their own fleet outside the hyperscalers and the…
People in this episode
Guest: Aayush Shah
Topics covered
- Continuous Integration
- AI Agents
- Cloud Economics
- CI Workloads
- Test Failures
- Multi-Tenancy
Keywords
- Continuous Integration
- AI Agents
- Blacksmith
- Cloud Economics
- GitHub Actions
- Test Failures
- CI Workloads
- Multi-Tenancy
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Blacksmith, Cockroach, Faire, GitHub, EBS, SSD, hyperscalers
More episodes of Software Huddle
- AI and Proactive Reliability with Kolton Andrus · April 8, 2026 · 55 min
- Making Data Agent Ready with Andre Elizondo · March 27, 2026 · 52 min
- Exponential Engineers with Ashmeet Sidana · January 9, 2026 · 53 min
- Powered by Neurons with Ewelina Kurtys · September 16, 2025 · 43 min
- Lessons from Building AI Agents with Rafal Wilinski · August 12, 2025 · 1h 9m
- Building a High-Ownership Engineering Culture with Matt Watson · August 5, 2025 · 52 min
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Software Huddle podcast page.