We still see teams configure their CI and CD tools by directly embedding complex multi-line commands directly into the configuration of the tool. Often these embedded commands also contains steps that would only ever take effect in the build environment including things such as CI specific environment variables, steps that would create/modify files and templates only in the CI environment etc. This makes the build environment a special beast - whose results cannot be duplicated locally on a developer's machine.
This is extremely problematic because the CI/CD tool, which is supposed to expose problems in your code, itself becomes a complex beast whose behavior is hard to debug and whose results are hard to replicate.
The way to avoid programming in your CI/CD tool is to extract the complexities of the build process from the guts of the tool and into a simple script which can be invoked by a single command. This script can then be executed on any developer workstation and therefore eliminates the privileged/singular status of the build environment.
