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Slow CI/CD pipelines are not a minor inconvenience — they’re a hidden tax on engineering velocity.
Every minute developers spend waiting for a build is a minute they are not shipping value.

The main issue?
Most pipelines rebuild everything on every run:

  • re-downloading dependencies
  • rebuilding unchanged Docker layers
  • recreating artifacts

This redundant work compounds into delays and compute waste.

🔹 The fix: Intelligent Caching

Implementing caching for:

  • Docker layers
  • package manager dependencies
  • Terraform plugins
  • language build artifacts

can reduce build times massively.
I’ve seen teams drop from 15–20 minutes → 3 minutes simply by enabling shared dependency caches.

🔹 Why this matters

  • Faster developer feedback loops
  • Lower cloud compute costs
  • More frequent and reliable deployments
  • Happier engineering teams

Your pipeline shouldn’t be the slowest part of your product development.
Optimise it — and everything else accelerates.