[shykes]

If I may offer a different perspective: Dagger has always been a general-purpose composition engine, built on container tech. Its most successful use case is CI - specifically taking complex build and test environments, and making them more portable and reproducible. But we never claimed to replace Jenkins or any other CI platform, and we've always been very open with our community about our desire to expand the use of Dagger beyond CI. We also never claimed to replace Docker, or to "be a shell" (note that the title of this HN page doesn't reflect the title of our post in that regard).

Every feature we ship is carefully designed for consistency with the overall design. For example, Dagger Shell is built on the same Dagger Engine that we've been steadily improving for years. It's just another client. Our goal is to build a platform that feels like Lego: each new piece makes all other pieces more useful, because they all can be composed together into a consistent system.

[randomtechguy]

It's a fair point - My opinions and use case are my own, I didn't mean to imply or assume there were promises not kept. The dagger team has been nothing but supportive and I do think has built a great community.

That said, in the early days it was definitely pitched for CI/CD - and this how we've implemented it.

> What is it? > Programmable: develop your CI/CD pipelines as code, in the same programming language as your application.

> Who is it for? > A developer wishing your CI pipelines were code instead of YAML

https://github.com/dagger/dagger/blob/0620b658242fdf62c872c6...

Edit: This functionality/interaction with the dagger engine still exists today, and is what we rely on. The original comment is more of an observation on the new directions the project has taken since then.

[shykes]

Yes it's a fair observation. In terms of use cases, we did focus exclusively on CI/CD, and only recently expanded our marketing to other use cases like AI agents. It's understandable that this expansion can be surprising, we're trying to explain it as clearly as possible, it's a work in progress.

I just wanted to clarify that in terms of product design and engineering, there is unwavering focus and continuity. Everything we build is carefully designed to fit with the rest. We are emphatically not throwing unrelated products at the wall to see what sticks.

For example, I saw your comment elsewhere about the LLM type not belonging in the core. That's a legitimate concern that we debated ourselves. In the end we think there is a good design reason to make it core; we may be wrong, but the point is that we take those kinds of design decisions seriously and we take all use cases into account when we make them.

[oulipo]

Why not just using "Dagger is a modern compositional framework, with applications from CI/CD to AI agents", so people understand perhaps better that it's meant as a "framework" rather than a "tool" for a specific use-case?

[shykes]

Yes, this is what we're going for. At the moment the website says "cross-platform composition engine". But elsewhere in this thread, someone complained that it's too vague. It's hard to find a good balance between "too specific" and "too general".