CircleCI introduces Chunk sidecars, lightweight microVM environments that run alongside AI coding agents during local development to validate changes before they reach CI. As AI agents flood CI pipelines with unreviewed commits, sidecars restore balance by running scoped 'microbuilds' within 60 seconds, catching failures locally while the agent is still in context. The tool is agent-agnostic (works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.), auto-detects your tech stack, supports environment snapshots for team sharing, and ensures parity with CI environments. Available now in preview for paid CircleCI plan customers.
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Balancing the inner and outer loopsHow sidecars workAccelerate your inner loop with sidecarsWhat’s nextSort: