Startup idea: tackle builds across the stack

Tuesday, September 30, 2025

We need a single tool that does all of:

• local builds (replace Make/Gradle/etc)
• CI builds (replace GitHub Actions)
• LLM sandbox builds (replace Claude Code terminal frontend)
• Cloud LLM builds (replace GitHub Workspaces)

These are weird bedfellows, but build systems touch all of these.

• Local and CI builds both have to encode artifact dependencies, and doing this for both local and CI builds usually requires a lot of fragile code generation.
• (Plus, iterating on CI build changes is awfully painful, considering the execution time; reducing duplication means that most CI build system changes can be tested locally in a much tighter loop).
• It was pretty wild to launch Claude Code outside of a container, but I probably would have done the same to be first to market. What’s crazy to me is that GitHub has just followed suite. No! Put the LLM in a container and stop asking me if you can execute make or find! (oh and by the way, you can depend on a suite of tools instead of first trying rg and recovering from a missing command with find -exec grep, etc) But then, wait, now my LLM container has to have all my dependencies in it. And there you go: the LLM tool has to be integrated with the build system.
• In exactly the same way, the cloud LLM tool needs access to all those same dependencies, and it has to know how to build the code anyway, and it might even be hosted by the same vendor that hosts your CI (i.e. GitHub).

My spicy take is that the build system is the hard part, all the LLM stuff is just dressing. Here’s my proof: no one has made a good build system yet, but all the other pieces that exist (Actions, Workspaces, Claude Code, containers) are fine. I’m not sure why this is: every time I set up builds I can’t believe I have to do it twice. The only project I’m aware of that even tries to do both local and CI builds well is Bazel, but they’re really up front that it’s slow for small local stuff, and this tool would need to embody the principle of making easy things easy and hard things possible. That first clause means it has to be fast for local builds, and also easy to install (no separate JVM install step). Bazel has whiz bang features like pulling build artifacts over the network for local builds, which is nice if you’re a company that is already big enough to fund your own build system(s), but not a feature I would start with.

Microsoft has all the business pieces to make this pencil: CI builds, LLM CLI tool, and LLM cloud tool. But could it get adoption by tying it all to their proprietary services like this, or would it have to be an open ecosystem?

Would also be an interesting product space for a startup, but how to make money on it? No idea, I’m just the technical cofounder, see, that’s what I rely on all you idea guys for. Hop to it, please, the downtown office I’m eyeing for our fully remote company won’t pay rent on itself!