AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

AI-powered development has accelerated code shipping but created a bottleneck in continuous integration (CI) systems, as validation hasn't kept pace with faster development cycles. Linear addressed this by optimizing their CI pipeline through infrastructure upgrades, toolchain modernization, and process improvements, reducing pull request wait times from over 6 minutes to just over 5 minutes while cutting runner time per test roughly in half, despite their test suite nearly quadrupling in size. Key optimizations included switching to faster third-party runners, adopting a native TypeScript compiler, and rewriting lint rules to use static analysis instead of full type checking.