Crazy in 2026, but installable software has some pros still, for both the developer and for the customer. And I would personally love if I could do things that way for more things.
We built a CI platform using dagger.io on top of GH Actions, and the "break glass" pattern was not an afterthought; it was a requirement (and one of the main reasons we chose dagger as the underlying foundation of the platform in the first place)
I did a PoC of Dagger for an integration and delivery workload and loved the local development experience. Being able to define complex pipelines as a series of composable actions in a language which can be type checked was a great experience, and assembling these into unix-style pipelines felt very natural.
I struggled to go beyond this and into an integration environment, though. Dagger's current caching implementation is very much built around there being a single long-lived node and doesn't scale out well, at least without the undocumented experimental OCI caching implementation. Are you able to share any details on how Fastly operates Dagger?
Even if I get the idea of an automation before there’s a run book for it.
I generally recommend that the break glass solution always be pair programmed.
Ironically, this makes Dagger even more relevant in the age of coding agents: the bottleneck increasingly is not the ability to generate code, but to reliably test it end-to-end. So the more we all rely on coding agents to produce code, the more we will need a deterministic testing layer we can trust. That's what Dagger aspires to be.
For reference, a few other HN threads where we discussed this:
Yes, I agree on your assessment. AI means a higher rate of code changes, so you need more robust and fast CI.