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Ship Agents that Ship: A Hands-On Workshop - Kyle Penfound, Jeremy Adams, Dagger
Takeaway
Dagger turns agent loops into portable containerized workflows that ship to CI, letting you treat coding agents as just another reusable Dagger module.
Summary
- Hands-on Dagger workshop building a SWE agent and deploying it to GitHub Actions so it can run agents from CI even when conference Wi-Fi fails locally.
- Dagger is positioned as a container runtime + workflow engine that runs identically locally and in any CI (GitHub, Kubernetes); now LLMs are also first-class components alongside containers/directories/files.
- Cross-language Dagger modules: write in Go/Python/TypeScript/Java/PHP and use other modules from Daggerverse via native bindings regardless of original language.
- Founders are the original Docker founders — original Docker containerized one app, Dagger containerizes whole portable engineering workflows including agent loops.
daggerci-cdagents
Original description
Coding agents are transforming how software gets built, tested, and deployed, but engineering teams face a critical challenge: how to embrace this automation wave without sacrificing trust, control, or reliability. In this 80 minute workshop, you’ll go beyond toy demos and build production-minded AI agents using Dagger, the programmable delivery engine designed for real CI/CD and AI-native workflows. Whether you're debugging failures, triaging pull requests, generating tests, or shipping features, you'll learn how to orchestrate autonomous agents that live in and around your codebase: from your laptop to your CI platform. We’ll guide you through: Building real-world agents with Dagger and popular LLMs (GPT, Claude, etc.) Programming agent environments using real languages (Go, Python, TypeScript) Executing agent workflows locally and in GitHub Actions, so you can bring them to production Using a composable runtime that ensures isolation, determinism, traceability, and repeatability Designing agents that automate and enhance debugging, test generation, code review, bug fixing, and feature implementation By the end of the workshop, you’ll walk away ready to build your own army of autonomous agents, working collaboratively across your codebase, locally and in CI, accelerating development without ceding control. Let’s build agents that don’t just talk, they ship! About Kyle Penfound Kyle is part of the ecosystem team at Dagger working on the future of composable software. He has a background in DevOps and just loves giving demos! About Jeremy Adams Jeremy is a senior leader with both a technical and a strategic streak. Passionate about people and entrepreneurship, integration and automation. Through technical/business roles at Dagger, GitHub, Twistlock, and Puppet, Jeremy has both zoomed in and zoomed out a lot, acquiring an appreciation for the details and an ever-broader sense of the big architectural picture. Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter