DAFT
Dumb And Fast Tasks — a server-less CI/CD system that lives in your repository. Every state transition is a signed git commit, so history is the audit log and the repo is the database. No server, no database, no JVM, no SaaS bill.
$0/min
Marginal cost — your hardware plus power
git log
Is the entire audit trail
Zero-idle
Cloud runners exist only while queued
CI/CD meters you, or makes you run a server.
SaaS CI/CD — GitHub Actions hosted runners, CircleCI, Buildkite, GitLab Premium, Harness — bills on per-minute compute, per-seat fees and warm-pool surcharges. At 50–200 jobs a day across a small team that is real money, and the audit trail lives in a vendor store subject to retention windows and proprietary export. It evaporates the day you cancel.
The self-hosted FOSS escape hatch is Jenkins, which trades the bill for a server, a database, a JVM and a plugin-maintenance job nobody wants. For solo developers and five-person shops running their own hardware, neither cohort fits.
History is the audit log. The repo is the database.
01
Every state change is a signed git commit
DAFt records each state transition as a signed commit, so the pipeline's whole history is reproducible with git log --reverse, exportable to any git host, and verifiable against the original public keys. There is no separate control-plane database to trust, back up, or lose — the audit trail is the repository, forever.
02
Your hardware, one logical pool
Runners are a queue attribute, not a vendor menu. Cloud x86 (AWS, Hetzner, Fly), ARM64 on a sleeping Mac mini woken over wake-on-LAN, a GPU host, and bare metal in a closet all live in the same pool, scoped by ISA and capability — no separate plan tier for ARM, GPU, or on-prem.
03
Zero-idle cloud runners
The DAFt Shepherd allocates a cloud VM only when a job is in queue and tears it down within seconds of idle. A runner that is not executing, draining or bootstrapping does not exist — so there is no warm-pool surcharge and adding the eleventh runner is free.
An early MVP, running our own repos.
| Milestone | Status | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Task engine — single-purpose Bash components | Running | Dogfooded on studio repos |
| Signed-git-commit audit trail | Running | git log --reverse |
| Shepherd — zero-idle cloud runners | In progress | Roadmap groups 1–7 |
| Heterogeneous runner pool (x86 / ARM / GPU) | In progress | Roadmap |
DAFt is an early MVP (v0.1.x) used internally as the studio's own CI. The full roadmap has not shipped, and the comparison claims against SaaS and Jenkins assume it has — treat the cost and behaviour figures as design targets and self-measurements until an external benchmark confirms them.
FOSS core, with a hook that pays.
The core is free and open source, competing head-on with the paid CI/CD rack. The commercial question — the one that decides whether DAFt becomes a company rather than a beloved tool — is the paid hook above the core: a managed Shepherd control plane for teams that do not want to run their own, and a signing and compliance tier for regulated buyers.
DAFt is also the studio's build-and-release substrate: its signed-commit provenance feeds the reproducible-build and sealed-image work across the portfolio, so the CI that assembles a sovereign compute base can itself run on hardware you own.