boat Matches Blacksmith at One-Eighth Cost

This is a compelling dogfooding signal, but the savings claim is more credible than the speed comparison until an independent benchmark exists.

• –boat’s own comparison acknowledges Blacksmith was not measured in the same CPU benchmark, so “as fast” remains anecdotal.
• –Persistent VMs let teams retain caches, dependencies, and build state instead of recreating runners for every job.
• –Blacksmith remains the simpler choice for GitHub Actions teams wanting a managed drop-in runner with minimal workflow changes.
• –The economics become especially interesting for AI-heavy CI, where parallel builds, evaluations, and coding-agent workloads can quickly dominate infrastructure spend.