Never Do the Same Work Twice: Rethinking CI for the Agent Era with Dan Manges

Brandon interviews Dan Manges, co-founder and CEO of RWX, about why continuous integration is the bottleneck for engineering teams working with coding agents. Manges, previously CTO at Braintree and Root, explains that he started RWX after watching CI tooling fail to scale with fast-growing codebases in regulated industries. He argues that feedback loops under five to ten minutes keep engineers in a flow state, and that slower loops push people (and agents) into costly context switching.

Manges describes how RWX differs from traditional CI platforms. Instead of splitting pipelines into jobs that each spin up a virtual machine and repeat the same setup, RWX models work as a directed graph of tasks with declared dependencies, so everything runs with maximum parallelization and only once. He cites Datadog's recent blog post about the strain that cloning code across so many parallel jobs put on its Git servers. Failures can be retried from the point of failure, and compute can be sized per step. He explains that RWX uses content-based caching rather than Docker's lineage-based caching, so a cache miss can be followed by a cache hit and only the work affected by a change runs. Under the hood, he says, RWX built its own distributed container runtime on the same low-level primitives as Docker, runs on AWS, and is hosted by default, with an option to run inside a customer's own VPC.

On agents, Manges says every RWX workflow can run from a CLI without a commit and push, which gives agents a fast, synchronous, more accurate and token-efficient loop. He recommends telling agents to run the CI workflow before they open a pull request, so the status check goes green instantly through caching, and argues there is no longer a reason for a human to be in the loop for build failures. He notes that review practices will vary widely, from thorough human review to software factory automation, and mentions a customer that has agents write throwaway Playwright tests for QA. He describes Honeycomb's move from CircleCI, which he says doubled their PR velocity, and the "AI legible CI" they describe. Looking ahead, Manges says the bottleneck in software engineering is shifting from writing code to validating it, and that RWX is expanding into sandboxes, preview apps, and custom webhooks. He says customers have asked about code hosting and review, but he promises nothing.

SHOW: 1073

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1073 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/2QnbYmRltgM

SHOW SPONSORS:

• Palo Alto - Secure every identity with Idira by Palo Alto Networks
• Nord Security - NordLayer AI Scout

SHOW LINKS

• RWX
• Honeycomb switches to RWX for agent-ready CI/CD
• AI Amplifies Existing Practices: Lessons from Our AI Shift
• How Datadog Rebuilt Git Serving for CI (gitretriever)

GUEST BIO

Dan Manges is the co-founder and CEO of RWX, a cloud platform for running CI/CD and other automation for engineering teams and their coding agents. He was previously the founding CTO of Braintree, the payments company that acquired Venmo and was acquired by PayPal, and co-founded car insurance carrier Root, which went public in 2020.

Contact Dan Manges:

• LinkedIn: dmanges
• Twitter/X: @dan_manges
• GitHub: dan-manges
• Medium: @dan_manges
• Website: dan-manges.com

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