As another commenter said, it's good to write as much CI logic outside the yaml file as possible. I take this a step further and approach CI with the mentality

As another commenter said, it's good to write as much CI logic outside the yaml file as possible. I take this a step further and approach CI with the mentality that I should be able to run all of my CI jobs locally with a decent interface (i.e. not by running 10 steps in a row), and then I use CI to automate my workflow (or scale it, as the case may be). But it always starts with being able to run a given task locally and then building CI on top of it, not building it in CI in the first place.