From 1.2GB to 24MB: How I Sped Up Our Next.js CI/CD Pipeline by 4 in One Afternoon

The Situation

Our team's CI/CD pipeline on Azure DevOps was taking 15 minutes to complete on every push to develop. You'd merge a PR, grab a coffee, come back — and it was still running. A 15-minute feedback loop breaks flow state — by the time the pipeline finishes, you've already switched context twice and forgotten what you were checking.

I spent an afternoon digging into the Azure DevOps logs. Here's what I found.

The Numbers (Before)

Artifact content (uncompressed): 1,218 MB (1.2 GB)