I need to debug a thing that runs in CI. Part of the run is a tool that takes five minutes to run and this makes iterations slow. I could rewrite that to run in less than ten seconds, but doing that would take a week or two of full time work. What do I do?
EDIT: posted a response describing what I actually did
@liw do the slow detour if it can be useful for other things than just that debugging
@liw I am in favor of sshing into the CI in this situation and just iterating in place. I don't care that this is not what CI is for or not how it should be used.
<evil grin> use an LLM to interpret the CI definition and ask it to generate an overengineered stub that simulates your CI environment and then call that every time?
(yes I've seen people do that 🤷)
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@liw Perhaps there is a less aggressive rewrite that could be done more quickly that would reduce the runtime to, say, two minutes, by just optimizing what is already there. I would check out that possibility first.
This got more interest than I expected. My least serious polls do that. But it's fine.
I went with the "fake it" option, because the thing I was debugging was not inherently about the tool I was using, but about the things happening in CI when publishing the output. By removing the real tool from the process, I shortened the iteration cycle to about half a minute. This allowed me to find the root cause of the problem, which turned out be something entirely different than I though it'd be.
I love a detour to fix something properly, but this time, the tool was not the cause of the problem, and I didn't want to take time off from work to rewrite it. I work on the CI system itself, so figuring out why that wasn't working right was what I spent my time on.