> The feedback cycles are very long (cloud machines are much slower than local ones) and IDE tooling is bare-bones.

I'm continuously amazed that none of the major CI providers offer standalone tooling to run and debug your CI pipelines locally. Seems like it'd be a killer feature for anyone working with complex pipelines.

I've been building Jaypore CI for exactly this tradeoff. The config is a single python file and I run jobs using a git hook on my own laptop.

I'd love some feedback on what else I could add to this project to make life easier for people.

https://www.jayporeci.in/

Testing the pipelines is a thing as well. But pretty tricky to set up. You basically need to run dockerized actions locally for that. Not impossible and I've seen some attempts to do that. But I can't really justify spending a lot of time on this stuff.

The kotlin scripting support for github actions that I mentioned addresses things like typos, refactoring, and IDE tooling. Try it, it's pretty nice and easy to use. We actually have an integrity check as part of our build that runs the kts script to verify the yaml file stored in the repository is consistent with what the script generates.

Exactly this. We are having quite complex pipelines and almost weekly basis we introduce some regression bugs there or change the rules so that they don't work anymore properly. It takes around 20 minutes to run the whole pipeline and of course some jobs are only triggered when merging to master etc. The development flow is painful and slow (although we have found some tooling to run some parts of our pipelines locally).