In January 2025, our CI configuration had grown to 4,200 lines of YAML spread across 38 files. Every service had its own pipeline, its own caching strategy, its own deployment quirks. Engineers spent more time debugging CI than writing code — I know because I tracked it. Three full days in February alone were lost to a misconfigured matrix build that nobody on the team could reproduce locally.
The YAML Problem Nobody Talks About
YAML is not a programming language, but we were treating it like one. Conditionals, loops, template variables, shared libraries — all expressed through whitespace-sensitive configuration that no linter could reliably validate. The real cost was not the syntax. It was the cognitive overhead of maintaining infrastructure-as-code that refused to behave like code. When your deploy pipeline needs its own on-call rotation, something has gone fundamentally wrong.
We had conditionals, loops, and template variables — all expressed through whitespace-sensitive configuration that no linter could reliably validate.