--- schema: 1 type: video title: >- CI/CD Is Dead, Agents Need Continuous Compute and Computers — Hugo Santos and Madison Faulkner description: >- Traditional CI/CD was built for humans pushing one or two diffs a week. Scale to thousands of autonomous agents opening PRs continuously and you get runner saturation, cold Docker builds on every branch, cache thrash, and a merge queue that starts behaving like a serialized database lock where time-to-commit becomes the actual bottleneck. Madison Faulkner and Hugo Santos (Namespace) lay out what replaces it: no PRs, just intent and plan fed into an agent loop with fast inline validation. Changes queue in a premerge layer where humans review intent-plus-outcome rather than diffs. The end state they're pointing toward is agents exploring multiple commits in parallel for the same plan, a multiverse where the tip of the repo is a moving target and the inner loop needs to be stateful and fast enough to keep up. Speaker info: - https://x.com/madsfaulkner - https://www.linkedin.com/in/madisonhfaulkner/ - https://namespace.so/blog/introducing-namespace - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugomgsantos/ Timestamps 0:00 Introduction and speaker bios 1:28 Why agentic software is breaking traditional CI/CD 1:59 The fragmented lifecycle of modern software development 2:25 How traditional CI/CD pipelines work 2:55 The problems with CI/CD at agent scale 4:04 Replacing CI/CD with acceleration and orchestration 6:12 Real-world solutions and the future of agentic loops 7:23 The role of the human as the agent 8:43 Why Pull Requests (PRs) are becoming a bottleneck 10:00 A new architecture: Intent and plan-based development 11:58 Moving toward fully automated internal/external validation 13:46 The premerge queue and human-in-the-loop review 15:20 The future: Parallel development in the multiverse 16:51 Conclusion: The shifting role of CI and governance --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/VktrqzQgytY-ci-cd-is-dead-agents-need-continuous-compute-and-computers-hugo-santos-and-madison-faulkner Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- canonical: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/ci-cd-is-dead-agents-need-continuous-compute-and-co-fca8f66e885c markdown: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/video/ci-cd-is-dead-agents-need-continuous-compute-and-co-fca8f66e885c.md llms: null parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-24T14:11:20.355Z' language: null children: [] videoId: VktrqzQgytY durationSeconds: 1117 publishedAt: '2026-05-13T13:00:06.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 25 endSeconds: 94 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/VktrqzQgytY?t=25' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 105 endSeconds: 127 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/VktrqzQgytY?t=105' heldReason: rights - 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ordinal: 18 text: null startSeconds: 928 endSeconds: 941 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/VktrqzQgytY?t=928' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 19 text: null startSeconds: 941 endSeconds: 1011 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/VktrqzQgytY?t=941' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 20 text: null startSeconds: 1011 endSeconds: 1023 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/VktrqzQgytY?t=1011' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 21 text: null startSeconds: 1023 endSeconds: 1117 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/VktrqzQgytY?t=1023' heldReason: rights --- # CI/CD Is Dead, Agents Need Continuous Compute and Computers — Hugo Santos and Madison Faulkner Traditional CI/CD was built for humans pushing one or two diffs a week. Scale to thousands of autonomous agents opening PRs continuously and you get runner saturation, cold Docker builds on every branch, cache thrash, and a merge queue that starts behaving like a serialized database lock where time-to-commit becomes the actual bottleneck. Madison Faulkner and Hugo Santos (Namespace) lay out what replaces it: no PRs, just intent and plan fed into an agent loop with fast inline validation. Changes queue in a premerge layer where humans review intent-plus-outcome rather than diffs. The end state they're pointing toward is agents exploring multiple commits in parallel for the same plan, a multiverse where the tip of the repo is a moving target and the inner loop needs to be stateful and fast enough to keep up. Speaker info: - https://x.com/madsfaulkner - https://www.linkedin.com/in/madisonhfaulkner/ - https://namespace.so/blog/introducing-namespace - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugomgsantos/ Timestamps 0:00 Introduction and speaker bios 1:28 Why agentic software is breaking traditional CI/CD 1:59 The fragmented lifecycle of modern software development 2:25 How traditional CI/CD pipelines work 2:55 The problems with CI/CD at agent scale 4:04 Replacing CI/CD with acceleration and orchestration 6:12 Real-world solutions and the future of agentic loops 7:23 The role of the human as the agent 8:43 Why Pull Requests (PRs) are becoming a bottleneck 10:00 A new architecture: Intent and plan-based development 11:58 Moving toward fully automated internal/external validation 13:46 The premerge queue and human-in-the-loop review 15:20 The future: Parallel development in the multiverse 16:51 Conclusion: The shifting role of CI and governance --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/VktrqzQgytY-ci-cd-is-dead-agents-need-continuous-compute-and-computers-hugo-santos-and-madison-faulkner Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/ci-cd-is-dead-agents-need-continuous-compute-and-co-fca8f66e885c · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md) > Search chunk text is held until public-source provenance is verified. ## Document chunks --- #### Chunk 0: Document excerpt (0:15 to 1:34) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 1: Document excerpt (1:34 to 2:29) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 2: Document excerpt (2:29 to 3:01) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 3: Document excerpt (3:01 to 4:08) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 4: Document excerpt (4:08 to 4:21) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 5: Document excerpt (4:21 to 6:18) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 6: Document excerpt (6:18 to 7:24) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 7: Document excerpt (7:24 to 8:47) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 8: Document excerpt (8:47 to 10:16) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 9: Document excerpt (10:16 to 12:05) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 10: Document excerpt (12:05 to 13:46) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 11: Document excerpt (13:46 to 15:28) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 12: Document excerpt (15:28 to 16:51) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text. --- #### Chunk 13: Document excerpt (16:51 to 18:37) > Held: transcript rights do not permit this chunk's text.