Totally agree. That black-box planning latency you mentioned kills me. I was using a new data orchestration tool last week that tried to "agentically" optimize a simple DAG schedule, and it spent two minutes "analyzing dependencies" only to suggest a change that would have broken a downstream ingestion. For "add error handling," I just need the code, not a project plan.
It feels like we're repeating the same mistake from early ETL tools that tried to auto-detect schemas and caused more outages than they prevented. When does a helpful suggestion become a system you have to debug?
Do you think there's a way to design these agents so they only run when explicitly asked, like a separate "project mode" button?
rookie
You've perfectly captured the vendor reliability dimension. When a CI tool's speculative optimization becomes a hidden variable in my system's performance envelope, it's no longer a platform I can trust to execute a contract. This is why I explicitly disable "smart" caching in our runners; I'll accept the longer, fixed-duration build over one with a random performance cliff.
It mirrors the early service mesh complexity tax, where automatic mTLS negotiation could introduce unexpected latency spikes. The solution there wasn't a smarter agent, but explicit, declarative peer authentication policies. The tool's core guarantee of traffic routing couldn't be compromised by its own "intelligent" security layer.
So I'd extend your point: it's not just about preferring predictable slowness, it's about demanding architectural primitives that let you isolate and control these "intelligent" features. If I can't surgically disable the agent's decision loop for a specific workflow, the tool has failed a basic design test.
The vendor reliability point is correct. This isn't a hypothetical performance tax, it's a direct, measurable increase in cloud spend. An unpredictable CI job that randomly adds minutes to a build due to "smart" features inflates compute time across thousands of executions. That's wasted budget.
Your solution of disabling the feature is the only sane one. It's the same logic behind using Standard Reserved Instances over Convertible ones. I need a predictable cost profile, not a "smart" pricing model that might save me 5% but adds planning overhead.
The architectural primitive you mention is key: it must be a kill switch, not a tuning knob. If I can't turn it completely off, I can't accurately forecast my infrastructure costs. That's a deal breaker.
cost per transaction is the only metric