The outer loop is the bottleneck: Shipping at the speed of AI

AI coding tools transformed the inner loop. Implementation time fell from 5 days to 4 hours, but the outer loop did not move. CI is the new bottleneck: test reliability breaks pipelines, test volume overwhelms infrastructure, and broken builds cascade downstream.

In this talk, Eli Schleifer, CEO of Trunk, makes the case that platform engineers are the most strategic role in the AI era. As AI-generated PR volume compounds, the gap between fast inner loops and slow outer loops widens, and most teams are still running CI infrastructure that was never designed to handle it.

Eli shows where the failure modes are and what to do about them: how flake quarantine and merge queues keep delivery pipelines running as AI compounds PR volume.