essentially in my build i “think” my computer and ci system are getting saturated with the number of tasks running at the same time. and One task that uses testContainers fails because the container doesn’t startup in time. I know i can make the timeout be longer, but that feels like a bandaid ontop of something that never timesout if that task runs by itself

But actually you should embrace configuration cache instead of the parallel setting, as with CC even tasks in the same project can run in parallel is they don't depend on each other.

Is there any way to set

org.gradle.workers.max

programatically? Its tough to pick just one value for everyones machines and CI

i;m assuming not, but it could be possible to pass in a custom arg in our CI