Cut CI Environment Setup Time in Half with Chunk sidecar Snapshots
Waiting minutes for CI feedback while you're building with AI agents kills your momentum. Chunk sidecars snapshots let you freeze your environment after setup, so every boot skips the install and starts from a cached state instead of scratch.
In this tutorial, we demo how to set up Chunk sidecars, snapshot it, and boot from that snapshot. We also benchmark the difference: a cold sidecar start took 45 seconds. Booting from the snapshot took 12 seconds. That's 30+ seconds saved on every run, multiplied across every developer, branch, agent, and session.
What you'll learn:
- What Chunk sidecars snapshots are and how they work
- How to install the Chunk CLI and initialize your project
- How to use the /chunk-sidecar Claude Code skill to automate setup and snapshotting
- How to share a snapshot across your org by committing the ID to your repo
- How to benchmark cold vs. snapshot sidecar boot times
00:00 Why sidecar snapshots matter
00:38 What is a sidecar snapshot?
00:57 Prerequisites and what we're building
01:13 Clone the demo repo
01:32 Install the Chunk CLI via Homebrew
02:00 Authenticate with a CircleCI API token
02:39 Initialize Chunk in your project
03:00 Set your CircleCI org ID
03:13 Run /chunk-sidecar in Claude Code
03:50 Snapshot created — sharing with your team
04:25 Benchmarking: cold start vs. snapshot boot
05:19 Wrap up and next steps
Full tutorial (blog): https://circle.ci/4gYrMei
Get started with CircleCI: https://circle.ci/4vRqQNq