2026-10-26 The shortest engineering path from ideas to products

The shortest engineering path from ideas to products Makoto Mizukami Senior Field Engineer, CircleCI 1

Hi there! ● ● ● Makoto Mizukami Senior Field Engineer @ CircleCI Used to be a support engineer at Microsoft, a full-stack hands-on engineer at a legal-tech startup, and a people manager at CircleCI and Degica / KOMOJU 2

The shortest engineering path from ideas to products Makoto Mizukami Senior Field Engineer, CircleCI 3

The shortest engineering path from ideas to a successful startup products 4

tl;dr 5

The golden path for startups - it’s nothing new Four important phases to make ideas into a successful startup Idea verification Customer Problem Fit Problem Solution Fit Product Market Fit Crystallize your idea to the level that no one can mimic, no one can be more passionate than you, and no one can refuse to fall in love with it eventually. Interview possible buyers, put yourself in their shoes, and thoroughly understand their challenges and pains. Identify unique value proposition, define product customer journey, and design user experience. Develop a product / MVP that implements your ideas, test your hypotheses with the product in the market, and adjust your direction. 6

AI changed only 1 phase 7

The golden path for startups - it’s nothing new Four important phases to make ideas into a successful startup Idea verification Customer Problem Fit Problem Solution Fit Product Market Fit Crystallize your idea to the level that no one can mimic, no one can be more passionate than you, and no one can refuse to fall in love with it eventually. Interview possible buyers, put yourself in their shoes, and thoroughly understand their challenges and pains. Identify unique value proposition, define product customer journey, and design user experience. Develop a product / MVP that implements your ideas, test your hypotheses with the product in the market, and adjust your direction. Itʼs YOU being passionate about crazy ideas. Not AI. Itʼs YOU listening to and representing customers. Not AI. Itʼs YOU tailoring customer experience emotion. Not AI. It doesnʼt have to be you to code MVP. 8

CPF is yours. PSF is yours. CPF + PSF are your ideas. Coding MVP is not. 9

So concentrate on your ideas 10

The shortest engineering path from ideas to products Focusing on techniques to implement MVP efficiently Makoto Mizukami Senior Field Engineer, CircleCI 11

2 things that will bother you while implementing MVP with AI 12

Speed of forward progress Code generation by violently-tireless AI 01 13

AI enabled people to code a lot almost universally 14

… and generated a lot of work that are just piling up. It isnʼt making yourself running faster necessarily. 15

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Source: DX, State of AI Impact in Engineering (data came from the report in Q2 2026 18

Source: DX, State of AI Impact in Engineering (data came from the report in Q2 2026 19

Actually some people managed to deliver more with AI 20

Thereʼs a huge gap in day-to-day throughput Source: CircleCI, State of Software Development Report Q2 2026 Pulse Report 21

While many orgs are struggling, the winners are widening the gap exponentially: p95 orgs are 9x faster on deliveries than the median Source: CircleCI, State of Software Development Report Q2 2026 Pulse Report 22

You need to deliver MVP faster than the “winners”. You cannot leave stuff piling up. 23

Gravity backward Regression, regression, regression! 02 24

MVP must reflect your ideas consistently 25

But AI is good at implementing something different inconsistently 26

Hint of that tendency: AI code tends to fail to pass tests Source: CircleCI, State of Software Development Report Q2 2026 Pulse Report 27

Then more back-and-forth was needed for corrections Source: CircleCI, State of Software Development Report Q2 2026 Pulse Report 28

Now we can understand why those people are spending a lot on AI p99 spending 11x what p90 spends p90 spending 54x what p50 spends Spend is up 3x in both p99 and p90 cohorts in 2026 A lot of spend to move forward and cancel the “gravity backwardˮ Can you afford it? Do you want to? 29

> things that will bother you while coding MVP 01 Speed of forward progress 02 Gravity backward How can you exploit the power of AI to move forward fast? How can you avoid the spoilers that push you backward? 30

What should we be doing then? 31

This was actually what the greatest engineers were doing. 32

What is the key essence of “good-oldˮ practices? ● ● ● ● Make a small investment in testing, and run tests small and repetitively ○ No need to be a fancy one, just a capability to run small tests (unlike time-consuming E2E tests) Test code locally before committing changes ○ Deliver only what you know. Do not bother your team with garbage you donʼt know what it is. Codify repetitive operations and automate it with minimal effort ○ At least “scriptizeˮ the testing procedure, building procedure, and deployment procedure ○ Then run tests, builds, and deployments automatically and autonomously ○ But never attempt to optimize the process / automation by yourself! Be aware that vibe coding can go in the opposite way! ○ It can generate a lot of untested code, without granularity or verifications ○ It can generate a lot of code at once, not granularly ○ It can fail to generalize what it built, making it harder to repeat at minimal cost 33

Then it should look like this holistically Change committed Outer loop System-managed) Inner loop Agent-driven) Debug Plan AutoBuild Release Note: This Release step is what your PMF experiment needs. Validate Local testing Code AutoDeploy AutoValidate Final Approval … then you want to run these loops as fast as possible! 34

The question is: How can it be made fast and effortlessly? 35

With CircleCI, these are available as an instant package Change committed Outer loop System-managed) Inner loop Agent-driven) Plan Debug Build Release Fast compute Validate Factory CI/CD Code Deploy Validate Smart Deployment Chunk sidecar Smarter testing Approval Microbuild 36

Chunk sidecars ● ● ● Mechanics for “shift-leftˮ: run validations as early as possible - while coding Coming with LLM configurations / skills, CLI, and microVMs mirroring CI environment 78 % faster than waiting for CI pipelines, 68 % cheaper than forcing agents to interact with CI 37

Smarter Testing - compilation of 4 features NEW PAID FEATURES Intelligent Test Selection Dynamic Test Splitting Auto-Rerun Failed Tests Test Analytics Dashboard Runs only tests impacted by your code changes via Test Impact Analysis. 100% confidence due to deterministic test selection. Distributes tests across parallel nodes dynamically during runtime using historical timing data, eliminating idle time and reducing wall-clock test time. Automatically retries failed tests at the individual test level without re-running the full suite. Test health data, skip rates, flaky trends, time saved to better understand your test suite performance. Coming Soon Save time (and costs) up to 80 % 38

Fast and efficient computation ● ● Adjust resource allocation: less CPU cores for single-threaded tasks, more memory for intensed jobs Modern “Gen2ˮ infrastructure - 40 % faster, 28 % cost saving 39

Smart deployments ● ● Make both build and deployment progress visible in one place - on CircleCI Manage version promotions and rollbacks from CircleCI - both manually and even automatically 40

The ultimate goal The demo presented at the SF Tech Week Workshop 41

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• https://docs.google.com/file/d/1WMcXDJHYGtk843SpeqrKvJVkGCM0UaTv/preview

Let’s reach PMF wisely, and as fast as possible. By applying good-old best practices and cutting-edge approaches 43

Exclusive offer for startups! ● ● ● CircleCI for Startups helps you start using Chunk sidecars and CircleCI overall 10,000 USD - up to 20,000 USD in free compute credits, for up to 24 months Free access to paid support (a 249 USD/month value), and gated features like machines with GPUs Visit https://circleci.com/startup-program/ OR http://antler.getproven.com/vendor/circleci-3 OR https://startups.aws.com/offers 44

• https://circleci.com/startup-program/
• http://antler.getproven.com/vendor/circleci-3
• https://startups.aws.com/offers

Thank you. 45