I've been working on this problem for the past couple of years. State of the art:

- local CLI instead of git push to run

- graph-based task definitions with automatic distributed execution, instead of the job/step abstraction

- automatic content-based caching to skip unnecessary executions (happens a lot in CI pipelines)

- container-based runtime (instead of proprietary base images) without using docker directly (too slow)

There are a lot of other ways to improve the developer experience. Happy to chat with anybody interested, I'm dan@rwx.com