CI/CD at Scale with Marko Gaćeša (Semaphore) | Semaphore, Product Engineering, Agent Native

Is testing, not coding, the real bottleneck of the AI era?

Marko Gaćeša is Head of Product at Semaphore, the agent native CI/CD platform built for coding agents: fast, affordable, enterprise-ready, and fully open source. A serial entrepreneur and technologist, Marko founded Dry Tools, served as Chief Product Officer at Alchemy Cloud, and has spent his career building high-quality software across domains such as medical equipment and industrial automation before entering the crowded CI/CD market.

In this episode, Marko breaks down what it takes to build a product for developers: why flaky tests are the worst enemy of fast delivery, how SemAI uses skills and agents to automate everything from GitHub Actions migration to flaky test analysis, and why the future developer experience lives inside your coding agent, not in a browser tab. We also go deep on the product side: running experiments with feature flags, pricing a CI/CD platform when a "minute of CI" means something different everywhere, product-led growth versus B2B sales, and structuring lean product teams when your engineers are the domain experts.

Key Topics:

- What Semaphore does and why CI/CD matters

- Testing is the biggest bottleneck in the age of coding agents

- What "agent native" CI/CD really means

- Flaky tests and how SemAI helps agents debug them

- Migrating from GitHub Actions automatically

- How Semaphore achieves faster and cheaper builds

- Running product experiments on infrastructure tools

- Pricing strategy in the CI/CD market

- Should AI agents trigger deployments?

- Product team structure in developer tools

- Book recommendations for product-minded engineers

CONNECT WITH MARKO & SEMAPHORE

💼 Marko on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markogacesa/

🌐 Semaphore: https://semaphore.io/

🐦 Semaphore on X: https://x.com/semaphoreci

🐙 Semaphore on GitHub: https://github.com/semaphoreio

💼 Semaphore on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/semaphoreci

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📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/

📸 Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev

💼 Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan

💼 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

- Semaphore open source repo: https://github.com/semaphoreio/semaphore/

- Semaphore CI/CD benchmark: https://semaphore.io/semaphore-ci-cd-benchmark-performance-and-cost-analysis

- Semaphore docs: https://docs.semaphore.io/

- Books mentioned: Hug Your Haters by Jay Baer, plus Inspired, Empowered, and Transformed by Marty Cagan and the Silicon Valley Product Group

#CICD #Semaphore #ProductEngineering #AgentNative #DevTools #DeveloperExperience #AIAgents #SoftwareEngineering

💬 Would you let an AI agent trigger your production deployments? Tell us in the comments.