Trusting Builds with Bazel Remote Execution
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
jmmv.devTechstory
calmpositive
Debate
20/100
BazelRemote ExecutionBuild Systems
Key topics
Bazel
Remote Execution
Build Systems
The article discusses the author's experience with Bazel remote execution and how it improved their build process, with the discussion focusing on the technical details and trade-offs of using Bazel.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Moderate engagementFirst comment
-2569152s
Peak period
6
90-96h
Avg / period
3.3
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Oct 12, 2025 at 5:03 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Sep 12, 2025 at 11:23 PM EDT
-2569152s after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
6 comments in 90-96h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 16, 2025 at 6:38 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45561888Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 3:16:55 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
As to the actual "why", even little things like BUILD files requiring you to enumerate dependency graphs gives you a leg up that you _can_ implement in other build systems, but likely won't. Whether you're a "monorepo" or not, you still have all your code living _somewhere_ as a monorepo, and the only question is how good your tooling is. How easy is it in your system to "run all tests properly depending on the set of changed files"? That's easy in Bazel and hard in every other solution I've seen (possible of course, but those sorts of constraints aren't the happy path for other build systems, so teams don't tend to build that way without a very solid lead imposing that strategy).
I don't get it, at all.
What should I read that will make me happier at having to use it?
If you are an "end user" who just wants to run your damn code without caring about your dev environment, then `bazel run|build|test //thing/to/run:target` is about as good as you can get! _If bazel is already set up_, I don't have to worry about my environment! It just works.
If your environment has a lot of churn and there isn't a team who makes sure bazel is actually configured correctly, then, yea, it is massive overkill for a lot of things and if you try to do things how you normally would and not the bazel way, you'll have a bad time.
There are other benefits - sometimes you want public APIs so it _can_ be used, but you want visibility rules to limit _who_ can use it. It is great for it's cacheability and dependency tracking - if you need advanced build tooling, it has what you need!
But there is a very real chance you don't need any of these things and so the cost is not worth it.
(I, personally, hate dev environment churn, so just having the CLI tooling uniformity is enough for me.)
But I’ve seen many builds, outside of FAANG, that are too slow and that also break frequently after a simple “git pull”. Which other systems promise to improve those, and how do they do it?