TL;DR: The thing that finally broke our bash-based pipeline wasn't a catastrophic failure — it was a Tuesday afternoon where three engineers spent 45 minutes staring at a deploy script trying to figure out why exit code 0 was returned on a job that clearly hadn't finished correctly. 📖 Reading time: ~35 min What's in this article The Moment Bash Stops Being Good Enough What 'Orchestration' Actually Means (Not the Marketing Version) Where GitHub Actions Hits Its Limits Buildkite: The First Orchestrator That Felt Like It Was Built for This The Moment Bash Stops Being Good Enough The thing that finally broke our bash-based pipeline wasn't a catastrophic failure — it was a Tuesday afternoon where three engineers spent 45 minutes staring at a deploy script trying to figure out why exit code 0 was returned on a job that clearly hadn't finished correctly.…