Hey everyone!

We're Yonas & Daniel, co-founders of StarSling.

TL;DR: StarSling Runners are an AI-native drop-in replacement for ubuntu-latest that continuously make your CI up to 6x faster and 13x cheaper. On day one, StarSling Runners are faster and cheaper. From there, AI agents analyze your pipelines and continuously ship optimization PRs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxcYY5cuSXA

🤔 Why now

Coding agents made writing code dramatically faster, and they’ve pushed PR volume up, which compounds CI times and cost fast.

Everyone has the option of getting fast CI runners now. What nobody has is CI that adapts and improves itself.

Meanwhile, keeping a CI pipeline fast is a constant manual chore: caches break, tests get flaky, build steps pile up, and someone has to notice and fix it, over and over. We believe DevOps tooling like CI should be as agentic as coding is, and that's the unlock behind self-driving CI: the optimization work that used to be a recurring human task now runs continuously in the background as part of the infrastructure running it.

🔥 The problem

Keeping CI fast is nobody's job and everybody's problem:

• Pipelines rot. Caches get misconfigured, dependency installs get slow, tests turn flaky, build steps stop being parallel. Performance quietly degrades until someone carves out time to fix it.
• Fast runners alone don't solve it. Swapping in faster hardware helps once, then your setup drifts right back as you add more code and tests and they get more complex. Plenty of products give you faster runners. None of them keep your pipeline optimized for you.
• It's getting worse. Recent GitHub Actions pricing changes hit teams running lots of jobs, and GitHub's focus has clearly moved elsewhere. When we surveyed companies looking for DevOps AI solutions, a GitHub Actions agent was the single most-requested solution engineers wanted.

🧯 The solution: self-driving CI

StarSling Runners are an AI-native, drop-in replacement for ubuntu-latest
that get faster the longer you use them:

• Fast infrastructure on day one. 5th Gen AMD EPYC (~30% faster than GitHub), actions/cache compatible with zero config, unlimited concurrency.
• AI agents that optimize your CI for you. Agents continuously scan your workflows, jobs, run logs, and machine telemetry, then open optimization PRs: fixing caching, speeding up dependency installs, parallelizing build steps, sharding tests, and restructuring workflows. This is the part nobody else does. Real PRs our agents opened and customers merged: sharding E2E tests across 3 parallel jobs (Mastra), optimizing Playwright browser installs and fixing turbo cache config (Better Auth).
• Cheaper, with no surprises. $0.008/min vs GitHub's $0.012/min (33% cheaper), queue time never billed, no seat fees.
• You stay in control. Every agent-authored optimization ships as a PR your team reviews and merges.
• Secure by default. Every job runs in its own single-use, hardware-isolated microVM that's destroyed after the run, the same isolation model GitHub-hosted runners use. Secrets pass directly from GitHub to your job and are never stored by StarSling.
• One-line install. Install the StarSling GitHub App and copy our AI install prompt to swap ubuntu-latest
  for starsling-ubuntu-24.04. You're on faster runners immediately, with 2,000 free minutes your first month. The optimization agents are in early access right now, so request access and we'll turn them on for your repos. 👇

📈 Traction

After being in private beta for the past four months, StarSling has now run over one million CI jobs for fast-moving teams like Better Auth, Mastra, Partcl, and more, and the self-driving AI agents is what won them over:

• Mastra got 6x faster CI:
  • "The runners are just handled, so nobody on my team thinks about CI infrastructure anymore, and the agents keep optimizing for the one thing I care about: minutes saved." - Abhi Aiyer, Co-founder & CTO at Mastra (YC W25)
• Better Auth got 2x faster E2E:
  • "StarSling agents are like a CI engineer we never had to hire. They find the slow spots, test out fixes, find the ones that work and open the PRs themselves." - Bereket Engida, Founder & CEO at Better Auth (P25)
• Partcl got 13x cheaper CI, and the agents proved themselves on day one:
  • "Within a day of migrating to StarSling Runners, their agents opened up a PR that literally made our Rust CI tests 2x faster!" - Vamshi Balanaga, Co-founder & CTO at Partcl (YC P25)

Full case studies: https://starsling.dev/customers

🏋️ Team

Daniel led the 12-person engineering team at Netflix that built their Internal Developer Portal ("Netflix Console"), the central hub for Netflix's 3,000+ engineers and the highest-DAU internal developer tool at the company. Before Netflix he was on Facebook's AI Camera team, building computer vision that powers camera effects for 100M+ DAUs across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

Yonas built StackShare, one of the largest online developer communities (1.5M+ registered developers), with an enterprise offering used by Fortune 500s to surface tech stack data across thousands of internal codebases. StackShare was acquired by FOSSA in 2024.

We've spent our careers on developer tools, and self-driving CI is the first part of a suite of tools we always wished we had.

🔮 Vision

DevOps should be as agentic as coding. CI is just the start. We're building toward a world where your entire pipeline improves on its own and AI agents take on the slow, manual engineering work that’s left after your coding agents finish, across the whole SDLC, so your team ships faster.

👇 Our ask

• Try it. If your team runs CI on ubuntu-latest, you're a one line change away from faster runs: https://starsling.dev. YC companies get 50% off the first year.
• Intros. If you know a CTO or VP Eng at a company drowning in CI time or cost, we'd love an intro: 📧 founders@starsling.dev

Happy Slinging!

- Yonas & Daniel