Long-term GitHub users have grown increasingly frustrated by its struggle to cope with exponential growth in pull requests, automation and monorepos driven by developers adopting coding agents, which in turn has exposed architectural decisions that haven’t kept up with the scale at which the service now runs.
When former HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto announced in April he was moving his open source Ghostty terminal project off GitHub and would probably use Buildkite (which he called “awesome”) for CI/CD, there was an unusual outpouring of enthusiasm for an area of devops often seen as slow, complex, fragile and frustrating. Airbnb, PagerDuty, Reddit, Shopify and Uber depend on Buildkite – as do Bazel, Bun, Elastic, Rails and NATS: open source developers seem to love it too.
Dynamic and developer centric
Buildkite started as a personal project; the original founder wanted a developer experience more like Heroku than Jenkins. Much of the original focus was about giving developers more control over software delivery, down to CI/CD pipelines and testing. That didn't stop platform teams at larger organisations like Shopify and PagerDuty from picking up Buildkite, often as an internal standard to replace multiple CI/CD systems chosen by individual teams.