# Achieving Fast Inner Dev Loops with Gradle: Configuration Cache and Beyond

DevFeed: [Achieving Fast Inner Dev Loops with Gradle: Configuration Cache and Beyond](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/achieving-fast-inner-dev-loops-with-gradle-configuration-cache-and-beyond-24617.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://blog.gradle.org/fast-inner-dev-loops-with-gradle>)

Author: Alex Semin

Published: 2026-05-20T04:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The Gradle Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-gradle-blog.md>)

Topics: [Gradle](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/gradle.md>), [code productivity](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code-productivity.md>), [build performance](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/build-performance.md>), [build times](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/build-times.md>), [Development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/development.md>)

Tags: [build](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/build.md>), [build-tool](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/build-tool.md>), [compilation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/compilation.md>), [context](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/context.md>), [developer-productivity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/developer-productivity.md>), [flow](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/flow.md>), [gradle](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/gradle.md>), [incremental](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incremental.md>), [kotlinconf](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kotlinconf.md>), [parallelism](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/parallelism.md>), [productivity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/productivity.md>)

## AI overview

This article explains how Gradle is working to accelerate inner developer loops. It describes the shift from execution time to configuration time as the main build bottleneck in large codebases, while highlighting configuration cache, incremental builds, build cache, and parallelism as approaches to reduce waiting and preserve developer flow.

## Source excerpt

How many engineers in your organization have to sit idle for 10 or more minutes just to rebuild the app locally after a small change? If you're an engineering leader, build engineer, or part of a developer productivity team, you're not alone in facing this challenge. Building complex software is inherently demanding, but the time your developers spend waiting has a profound impact beyond just the literal minutes lost. It fundamentally disrupts their psychological flow. "There are like these time scales of psychological flow, right? So if something takes longer than a minute, you already start planning for it... you suffer from context switch as well. If it's 1 second, that's where we want to be right in that seamless state of flow. And if it's less than one second, then you feel it's like magic... productive developers are happy developers." -- Rodrigo Oliveira When developers have to wait, their attention drifts, and the cost of context switching destroys their momentum. Our goal as enablers of developer productivity should be to eliminate this friction, bringing that feedback loop as close as possible to the "magical one second". In a recent presentation at KotlinConf 2025, Gradle engineers Rodrigo Oliveira and Alex Semin detailed how Gradle Build Tool is evolving to keep developers in that productive, happy "flow state". By tackling the most significant bottlenecks in modern software builds, Gradle is paving the way for incredibly fast inner developer loops. If you prefer to watch the presentation recording, you can find it here. The shifting bottleneck: From execution to configuration On every invocation, Gradle goes through three distinct phases: initialization, configuration, and execution. Historically, when we optimized Gradle builds, we focused almost exclusively on the execution phase. This is when the majority of work expected by a developer happens: production sources compilation, test execution, etc. For years, execution was the longest phase. We tackled thi