Let an agent break import cycles and make the app load lazily

Point a coding agent at the import cycles and eager imports behind a slow app boot, and merge what it lands.

Prompt

Evaluate and apply this CI technique to my repository: Let an agent break import cycles and make the app load lazily.

Point a coding agent at the import cycles and eager imports behind a slow app boot, and merge what it lands.

Read the technique and its source-backed company examples: https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/techniques/agent-import-cycles.md

Inspect this repository’s CI workflows, build and test commands, dependencies, and recent run timings. Identify where this technique applies and explain the expected benefit using this repository’s evidence.
Measure a baseline from recent comparable runs: elapsed time, queue time, runner minutes and failures where available. If data is unavailable, say what cannot be measured.
Compare relevant company approaches, checking prerequisites, platform differences and tradeoffs. Rank applicable options by evidence, fit and measurable opportunity; do not present company results as predictions for this repo.
Recommend the smallest safe change, show what checks and fallback paths remain, and ASK ME WHICH CHANGE TO APPROVE BEFORE EDITING ANY FILES.
Only after approval, work on a new feature branch, make one reversible change, and open a reviewable pull request. Never merge or push to a default or protected branch.
Keep required checks, test coverage, deployment and release behavior intact. Validate the change and compare equivalent runs where possible; report limitations and what should be monitored after merge.

View all playbooks

How Ramp used this technique

Read what Ramp changed and follow the original sources.

Let an agent break import cycles and make the app load lazily

Ramp's engineer in the August 2026 talk described telling the agent to fix all the app's import cycles and to make the app lazy, because the app boots up an enormous amount of Python modules. The agent made a lot of progress on both, and a lot of that code was merged. The talk presents this among the hard problems Ramp gave the agent.

2026: Ramp reported that a lot of the agent's import-cycle and lazy-loading code was merged. Source

Use it when: Tests and tools start the application, and its startup imports far more modules than a single test or command uses.
Before applying it: Lazy imports move a failure from startup to the first use, so keep a test that imports every module.

How Ramp used this technique

Let an agent break import cycles and make the app load lazily

Related techniques

Reduce repeated process and build-graph startup

Share module initialization only for explicitly safe tests

Balance test work across shards

Company Playbooks

Related guides

Cut repeated test setup

Shard tests across parallel jobs

Diagnose slow tests in CI

Optimize Playwright tests

Make Vitest run mode explicit