New Performance Challenges in the Agentic Era for Android Builds
summary
Measured data shows 3,300 local Gradle builds in one week with 1,700 agentic builds (52%), and a VS Code Kotlin extension that spawns a Gradle call per module can trigger hundreds or thousands of builds just by opening a project. Parallel agents share a single Kotlin daemon, creating GC contention — fix by increasing Kotlin memory or using in-process compilation. Experiments with nine parallel builds show a remote cache (Radius) is ~10% faster overall with a 36% higher cache-hit rate, and CI caching combos cut a 449s clean build to ~200s or 69s with local cache.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Agentic builds introduction
- 1:26AI-driven local builds
- 3:38Lighter editors and builds
- 8:50Parallel builds with Git work trees
- 12:26Parallel builds and caching
- 17:01CI builds surge with AI
- 19:30Dependency graphs reduce CI
- 21:19LLMs increase test workload
- 24:12CI caching strategies
- 32:41Specialized AI models for builds
- 38:47ML for CI agent allocation
- 40:10Gradle 9.5 AI features
- 42:42Summary and future
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