I don't know your exact situation; and there are sometimes genuinely valid reasons for an 8-hour CI/CD system; but ... man, reducing that down to like 20 minutes (which is possible and often common) would pay as many dividends as all the AI stuff that's been added. Man, like ... holy crap @_@
We're uh.. we're a well known and widely used piece of software. There is an insanely large amount of testing that needs to go in to each change across many platforms and configurations and we have a lot of devs hammering that system with changes to test. Even worse now because of AI...
If your company is really interested in doing AI stuff you may be able to sell people on the idea of a "fast agentic CI" where you:
1. Track code coverage from all current test cases in your big 8hr runs.
2. Index the coverage so it goes testcase name -> methods touched.
3. On every commit run an agent which looks at the diffs, tries to predict which tests the code being edited is touching, and run just those tests (or a random subset if there are too many).
Once you have this you can also automatically kick off builds every 8hr that contain all the previously submitted patches. Once that is done, if a test begins to fail, it can automatically bisect the history to find change, and notify the author.
You could also get these benefits with a Bazel like build system which can cache test executions so others don't need to rerun them if the binary is not changed.
