"Clever" Has No Place in CI

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:18:15 -0800

I wanted to share this separately on my site because, well, it made quite the impression over on LinkedIn, where I initially posted it.

Hot take: the code used in infrastructure engineering shouldn’t be complicated, nor should it be clever. It actually should be rather dumb.

If something goes wrong, you want it to be with the code you’re trying to build or ship, not an unexpected effect of an overly complex CI system.

Github Actions on A Blog for the Uninitialized

"Clever" Has No Place in CI