Linear halved CI runner time per test even as test suite quadrupled in size
Project management tool Linear overhauled its CI pipeline after AI coding agents caused a surge in pull requests, roughly quadrupling its test suite since early 2025. The company cut runner time per test by about half and reduced average PR wait time from over six minutes to just over five. Key changes included switching to faster third-party runners, removing TypeScript dependency from ESLint lint rules, capping git fetch depth, and moving cache writes off the critical path. A tech analysis notes these gains were achieved by parallelising workloads — adding shards, faster CPUs, and smarter caching — a strategy that scales well for automated testing. However, the same analysis cautions that code review remains a serial reasoning task that cannot be sharded the same way, meaning review bottlenecks may intensify as AI-generated code volumes continue to rise.
This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.


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