[kjuulh]

It is a perfectly valid crtitisim dagger is not a full build system that dictates what your artifacts look like. Unlike maybe something like bazel or nix. I think of dagger as a sort of interface that now allows me to test and package my build and ci into smaller logical bits and rely on the community for parts of it as well.

In the end you do end up slinging apt install commands for example, but you can test those parts in isolation. Does my ci actually scan this kind of vulnerability, install postgres driver, when I build a rust binary is it musl and working on scratch images.

In some sense dagger feels a little but like a programmatic wrapper on top of docker, because that is actually quite close to what it is.

You can also use it for other things because in my mind it is the easiest way of orchestrating containers. For example running renovate over a list of repositories, spawning adhoc llm containers (pre ollama), etc. Lots of nice uses outside of ci as well even if it is the major selling point