am i just bad at devops?

See your problem is you're editing the code until it passes the tests. It's way easier if you edit the tests until it passes the code.

This is what they mean by test driven development.
- castle.gif
Can't tell if you are joking. I know a lot of junior developers who think this is a legitimate solution.
Unless you are using groovy (jenkins), then you are running the pipeline to find syntax errors.
- This comment is triggering and it should have a NSFW spoiler.
- I hate groovy, gradle and Jenkins!
  
  I don't know if sth. Else is better but I can confirm that shit is horrific
- FYI, Jenkins has an endpoint to validate the pipeline without running it, and there's a VSCode extension to do this without leaving the editor: https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2018/11/07/Validate-Jenkinsfile/
I just replace all my tests with noop codes. Quick, easy, passes.
If true == true pass!

DevOps is bad because for some reason we've decided to invent new programming languages that you can't debug locally and so you have to keep pushing commits to the pipeline server. It's bullshit.

"Why do you write all your pipelines as shell scripts and then wrap them in yaml at the very end"?

Because then I can run them locally quickly and test individual components of them instead of "edit, commit, push, wait 10 minutes, read error message, repeat".

FWIW, gitlab-runner exec and earthly exist for running tests locally, with others things like nektos/act for GHA as a 3rd party solution. I’ll never get used to yaml, though, all my pipelines are mostly shell scripts. Using a markup language as a programming language was definitely one of the decisions of all time.
- Gitlab-runner exec and act are great tools, but this goes out of the window as soon as the cloud hosting service is a little less intelligent (looking at you, azure DevOps, who removed the hack that let pipeline run locally in 2019)

You just need to learn from big automakers and use Volkswagen!

Sir, you just made my day thank you!

How are you bad?

You got a green verification checkmark on the same day! That's a win!

My build environment has 3 jillion unneeded builds going. I am lucky to get 2 build failures in a single day.

Local tests are less shameful. Imagine if you had a Red X online for every compiler or syntax error whilst developing.

So it is.

This is what it looks like when I'm working on Jenkin files.

And only one of those runs has complete logs containing the actual error causing the failure.

What actually is devops?

development build of call of duty black ops

Come on! You need those red crosses to know it fails as it should. Thats what I would say they are there for :-)

If the build doesn't fit, you must...rerun the test suite locally

As a fellow jenkins miner. I know this red (x) all too well.