Continuous Integration at Agentic Velocity with CircleCI’s Rob Zuber

When code gets cheaper to produce, feedback becomes the limiting factor - CI, reviews, and the handoffs between tools can quietly slow everything down. Rob Zuber breaks down what platform engineers are seeing as teams adopt AI-assisted development: more branch builds, new failure modes, and growing pressure to shorten the loop between “change made” and “change validated.” He focuses on how CI can evolve from a human-first dashboard into a system that agents can interact with directly through APIs, CLIs, and MCP-style interfaces - so fixes can happen faster and with less waiting on manual triage. Along the way, Rob and Cory dig into practical questions engineering leaders are wrestling with: how PR review becomes the next major bottleneck, what “agent experience” means in a delivery pipeline, why speed isn’t only about faster compute (it’s also about doing less unnecessary work), and how teams can share learnings so “agentic velocity” doesn’t only benefit a few power users. If you’re building or running the systems that ship software, this is a clear look at where CI fits in an AI-accelerated workflow, and what needs to change to keep delivery safe, fast, and sustainable. Guest: Rob Zuber, Chief Technology Officer at CircleCI Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups, a four-time founder, and three-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series F funding and delivered on product innovation at scale while leading a team of 300+ engineers who are distributed around the globe. CircleCI, Website CircleCI, LinkedIn CircleCI, GitHub Links to interesting things from this episode: “The Confident Commit” podcast Wardley Mapping “How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code.”