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

AI-assisted coding is accelerating code production faster than many organizations’ validation pipelines can keep up, turning CI into a strategic bottleneck that raises infrastructure costs and slows developer feedback. Linear’s experience shows that improving CI requires a system-level approach—faster infrastructure, modern toolchains, and aggressively trimming critical-path work—rather than isolated test optimizations. For IT organizations, the implication is clear: if AI increases delivery velocity, CI must be redesigned to protect throughput, control spend, and prevent validation from becoming the new constraint on software delivery.