Vercel CI is in beta: it runs only the checks your change touches

Vercel announced Vercel CI in beta on October 28. The pitch is aimed at teams whose coding agents open a lot of pull requests: most CI systems rerun the whole workflow on every push, even for a one-line change, so the more agents push, the longer everyone waits. Vercel CI tries to run only what a change actually affects.

How it works. Vercel CI uses Turborepo, Vercel's build system for JavaScript and TypeScript repos, to read your task graph from turbo.json. You add "tags": ["ci"] to each task you want it to run, such as lint or test. There's no separate workflow YAML. On each git push, it works out which tagged tasks the change affects, restores anything already in Vercel Remote Cache (on by default), and runs the rest in dependency order, each in its own compute instance. It posts a check to your GitHub pull request, so existing branch protection rules can block merges when it fails. If you don't use Turborepo, Vercel says you can add turbo.json and the turbo package, including in single-package repos.

For agents. Runs and logs are available in the dashboard, the Vercel CLI (vc ci ls, vc ci inspect, vc ci logs, vc ci grep), Vercel MCP and Vercel's OpenAPI spec. Vercel's suggested setup is to ask your coding agent to run npx skills use vercel/ci@setup, which picks initial tasks and opens a pull request.

The numbers are Vercel's. Vercel says time from push to "CI passed" in its internal repositories is 2-6x faster than before, and that Vercel CI has run nearly 8 million tasks across its own repos and the private beta. MODEL has not tested it.

Pricing. Vercel CI bills compute in CPU minutes: $0.0035 per CPU minute on Pro, custom on Enterprise. Each task uses 2 CPUs by default and run bootstrapping uses 4. Vercel's example: 8 CPUs for 2 minutes 30 seconds is 20 CPU minutes, which works out to $0.07 at the Pro rate. Skipped and cached tasks don't use CPU minutes. The blog says the beta is available on all plans, but the pricing page lists only Pro and Enterprise rates.

Who it's for: teams already on Turborepo and GitHub, especially ones where agents push often and full CI runs are the bottleneck.

The caveats, from Vercel's docs. It's a beta and "features and configuration may change." GitHub is the only supported forge, git push is the only trigger, and Linux is the only base image. The repo must be connected to at least one Vercel project and not to projects on more than one Vercel team. It needs Turborepo 2.11.7 or later and Vercel CLI 64.3.1 or later. How much it skips depends on how your tasks are split in turbo.json.

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