In addition to the other comments suggesting dagger is not the saviour due to being VC-funded, it seems like they have decided there's no money in CI, but AI... yes there's money there! And "something something agents".
From dagger.io...
"The open platform for agentic software.
Build powerful, controllable agents on an open ecosystem. Deploy agentic applications with complete visibility and cross-language capabilities in a modular, extensible platform.
Use Dagger to modernize your CI, customize AI workflows, build MCP servers, or create incredible agents."
Hello! Dagger CEO here. Yes, we discovered that, in addition to running CI pipelines, Dagger can run AI agents. We learned this because our own users have told us.
So now we are trying to capitalize on it, hence the ongoing changes to our website. We are trying to avoid the "something something agents" effect, but clearly, we still have work to do there :) It's hard to explain in marketing terms why a ephemeral execution engine, cross-language component system, deep observability and interactive CLI can be great at running both types of workloads... But we're going to keep trying!
Internally we never thought of ourselves as a CI company, but as an operating system company operating in the CI market. Now we are expanding opportunistically to a new market: AI agents. We will continue to support both, because our platform can run both.
Please be careful. I'd love to adopt Dagger, but the UI in comparison to GHA, is just not a value add. I'd hate for y'all to go the AI route that Arc did... and lose all your users. There is A LOT to CICD, which can be profitable. I think there's still a lot more features needed before it's compelling and I would worry Agentic AI will lead you to a hyper-configurable, muddled message.
Thank you. Yes, I worry about muddling the message. We are looking for a way to communicate more clearly on the fundamentals, then layer use cases on top. It is the curse of all general-purpose platforms (we had the same problem with Docker).
The risk of muddling is limited to the marketing, though. It's the exact same product powering both use cases. We would not even consider this expansion if it wasn't the case.
For example, Dagger Cloud implements a complete tracing suite (based on OTEL). Customers use it for observability of their builds and tests. Well it turns out, you can use the exact same tracing product for observability of AI agents too. And it turns out that observability is huge unresolved problem of AI agents! The reason is because, fundamentally, AI agents work exactly like complicated builds: the LLM is building its state, one transformation at a time, and sometimes it has side effects along the way via tool calling. That is exactly what Dagger was built for.
So, although we are still struggling to explain this reality to the market: it is actually true that the Dagger platform can run both CI and AI workflows, because they are built on the same fundamentals.
Hmmmm... so I think the crux of the matter is here: that you clearly articulate why your platform (for both containers and agents) is really helpful to handle cases where there are both states and side-effects
I can understand what you're trying to say, but because I don't have clear "examples" at hand which show me why in practice handling such cases are problematic and why your platform makes that smooth, I don't "immediately" see the value-added
For me right now, the biggest "value-added" that I perceive from your platform is just the "CI/CD as code", a bit the same as say Pulumi vs Terraform
But I don't see clearly the other differences that you mention (eg observability is nice, but it's more "sugar" on top, not a big thing)
I have the feeling that indeed the clean handling of "state" vs "side-effects" (and what it implies for caching / retries / etc) is probably the real value here, but I fail to perceive it clearly (mostly because I probably don't (or not yet) have those issues in my build pipelines)
If you were to give a few examples / ELI5 of this, it would probably help convert more people (eg: I would definitely adopt a "clean by default" way of doing things if I knew it would help me down the road when some new complex-to-handle use-cases will inevitably pop up)
> * Don't bind yourself to some fancy new VC-financed thing that will solve CI once and for all but needs to get monetized eventually (see: earthly, dagger, etc.)
Literally from comment at the root of this thread.
Docker has raised money, we all use it. Dagger is by the originators of Docker, I personally feel comfortable relying on them, they are making revenues too.
Mise can install all your deps, and run tasks