> Most places I've worked, we don't build artifacts (docker images, whatever) until there's a merge The projects I've worked on have used a bot for merges, and

> Most places I've worked, we don't build artifacts (docker images, whatever) until there's a merge The projects I've worked on have used a bot for merges, and that bot handles building artifacts. In some cases, there's a lighter CI for "this looks reasonable", and then the full CI (including building artifacts and running more extensive test suites on every supported platform) runs before merging.