Vercel CI only re-runs the tasks your code change actually touched
The new Vercel CI, in beta on all plans, reads your existing turbo.json to work out which lint, build and test tasks a push affects, and serves the rest from cache instead of rerunning the whole pipeline.
Vercel launched Vercel CI in beta on 28 October. Instead of running an entire workflow on every push, which is how most CI systems handle even a one-line change, it uses Turborepo’s task graph to work out which tasks a change actually affects and runs only those, serving everything else from Remote Cache.
If a project already has a turbo.json, there is no separate CI config to write. Tagging a task is enough to opt it in:
{ "tasks": { "lint": { "tags": ["ci"] } } }Tasks that do run execute on their own machine on Hive, Vercel’s compute layer. Vercel says this gets push-to-green time down 2 to 6 times versus full runs, and that the system has already completed close to 8 million tasks across its own repositories and the private beta. It posts a normal check back to the GitHub pull request, so existing branch protection rules still gate the merge.
Why it matters: repos that get dozens of small pull requests a day, increasingly from coding agents rather than people, pay the same full-pipeline cost for a one-line fix as for a large change. Skipping unaffected tasks is a direct cost and wait-time saving for any Turborepo monorepo, and the vc ci CLI and Vercel MCP support mean an agent can check its own CI results without a human watching the dashboard.
The caveat: it runs alongside your existing CI rather than replacing it, and needs Turborepo (or a single-package repo with the turbo package added) to understand task dependencies.