Most teams set up CI/CD once and never look back. The problem is that pipelines rot ? they get slower, more fragile and harder to debug over time.
In this guide we walk through the principles that keep pipelines healthy:
**1. Keep pipelines fast**
Target under 5 minutes for your main pipeline. Use caching aggressively ? Docker layer cache, npm/pip cache, test result cache. A slow pipeline is a pipeline nobody trusts.
**2. Fail fast, fail loud**
Run the fastest checks first: lint, unit tests,