OpenSpec + Sandbox: Your CI Pipeline Is the Wrong Tool for AI Coding Agents
CI pipelines were designed for humans. A human developer submits a PR, waits 20 minutes for CI, reads the results, iterates. The feedback loop is slow — but human context doesn't expire in 20 minutes, so the timing works.
Then I read Signadot's piece on CI for coding agents. It names something I'd been working around for months without clearly naming it myself. I reached out to Ani, their CTO. We talked through how their sandbox model maps onto the achieve gate in OpenSpec. Three weeks later I had a working integration.
A coding agent doesn't have that luxury. It submits a change in seconds. If it waits 20 minutes for CI feedback, it doesn't wait — it moves on. The feedback arrives in a cold context. The correction has to fight its way back in.
CI isn't wrong. It was right for what it was designed for. It's just the wrong tool for this job.