Mintlify is, by far, the best way to build public-facing documentation for your company. They offer a platform for writing, editing, maintaining, and hosting content such as help guides, tutorials, and API references. They are trusted by an impressive set of companies around the world like Vercel, Cursor, X (formerly known as Twitter), Perplexity, Windsurf, Replit, Scale, AT&T, Zapier, and — of course — us!


For Mintlify, shipping fast is a top priority. The faster you ship, the faster you can deliver value to your customers. But, just like every software company before them, there’s that one thing that’s always standing between your ideas and your customers: CI/CD. Like many teams, Mintlify leaned on GitHub Actions. And, like many teams, they started with the choice of runners that was right in front of them: GitHub-hosted runners.

The Problem

Moving away from GitHub-hosted runners.

Very quickly, though, Mintlify was dealing with long queue times — waiting for these runners to even accept their jobs — and slow build times. Every PR became an 8-minute coffee break their engineers had to take before they could merge their code. This led to frustration, and they were on the lookout for a way to speed up their CI. Yet, they didn’t want to be distracted and slowed down by a huge, painful migration.

At Mintlify, one of the most important things to us is how quickly we can deliver value to our customers.

— Hahnbee Lee, Co-founder, Mintlify.

The Solution

The rise of a champion.

Sometimes, it’s not so easy to convince a user that your product is worth switching to, even if it’s technically superior. There is always that subtle human instinct that makes you doubt — even fear — new things. That’s where companies like ours dream of champions. Champions who are willing to burn some political capital for the greater good, and that’s exactly what happened here.


According to Hahnbee Lee, Co-founder of Mintlify, it all began with a brave soul named Ricardo who was willing to raise his hand one day and say, “What if we migrated our CI to Blacksmith?” We had an internal champion. He consistently advocated for Blacksmith, alongside a handful of other developer tools. But in the end, Blacksmith was the only suggestion that was actually implemented. Why?


Because unlike other tools — which came with extensive tutorials, new commands, and layers of accidental complexity — we were seamless. As a drop-in replacement for GitHub-hosted runners, we worked right out of the box with what they already used: GitHub Actions. And that’s not just our opinion. It’s also Hahnbee's opinion, as shared with us very enthusiastically in both this tweet and the following Slack message.

The migration experience was just soooo seamless! It really was just a few button clicks to get Blacksmith to work. As a founder myself, I respected it.

— Hahnbee Lee, Co-founder, Mintlify.

The Results

From 8-minute to 4-minute Docker Builds.

Today, Mintlify runs all of their CI jobs on Blacksmith. Before migrating to Blacksmith, Mintlify’s CI took around 8 minutes in total. After the migration, the total runtime was reduced to 4 minutes. That includes their longest-running job, which was a Docker Build. Now that our Docker layer caching feature is out, they’re also looking into how they could speed up their Docker Builds even more, by up to 40x more.

Blacksmith was such a low-effort way for us to instantly benefit from fast CI, allowing us to ship faster. We love Blacksmith.

— Hahnbee Lee, Co-founder, Mintlify.

If you’re suffering from slow builds and tests in CI, don’t wait — try us out. Our onboarding is seamless.