Every push to dev paid for the full browser trio and the backend suite,
including commits that touch only documentation, workflows or process
scripts — the bundle and the harness were byte-identical, so the runs
proved nothing new. On 2026-08-19 alone that was roughly six pushes at
about seven minutes each.
The reuse key per heavy job is sourceFingerprint (src, demo fixtures,
golden scenarios, build manifests) plus that job's own harness: smoke
takes demo/smoke_*.mjs, golden takes demo/golden/** including baselines,
performance_smoke takes demo/performance/**, backend takes tests_backend
and the Python sources. A cache marker is written only by a successful run
of the same key, so a hit proves a job with identical inputs already
passed. scripts/** is deliberately outside every key: infrastructure work
edits it constantly and reuse would never fire.
This is not the path filter from the `changes` job, which stays disabled
on dev on purpose: there the scope is guessed from paths and "green" means
different things, here input equivalence is proven by a hash. And a
release candidate always bumps the version, which is part of the
fingerprint, so its keys are new by construction and the full gate set
still runs before every beta and release.
A waived job is announced with a notice and a run summary line rather than
skipped in silence, and the marker save tolerates a concurrent identical
run instead of reddening the job.
Issue: #208
User-Visible: no
Rule 8 demanded a working S-label from every class A/B commit's issue,
while owner decision #118 sends infrastructure work outside the S1..S8
flow entirely — such an issue has no status label by construction. The
two rules contradicted each other and the machine-checked one won, so
Validate on dev went red on every infrastructure commit (#175, #191,
#202, #206) and the catch-up signal stopped meaning anything. A gate that
is always red is not a gate.
The waiver keys on the diff, not on a permission label: a range with no
class A file at all. An `infra` label could be pinned on a product task
to walk a product commit past the status check; ceasing to touch class A
without ceasing to be infrastructure work is not possible. Issue
existence, open state, `blocked` and fail-closed on an unreachable gh all
still apply, and the waiver prints a visible warning rather than passing
in silence.
Mutation-checked both ways: unwiring the waiver reddens the CLI test,
and letting class A keep the waiver reddens both new tests.
Issue: #207
User-Visible: no
performance_smoke burned nearly all of its 15-minute budget before the
benchmark even started, twice in a row: validate.yml had no browser cache
at all, so every browser job paid for a full `playwright install
--with-deps` — apt work the ubuntu-latest image makes redundant, with
unbounded retries against an unreachable azure mirror on top. For a
measuring job that is worse than lost minutes: the timing window competes
with package installation on the same runner.
#175 fixed this for the review pipeline but deliberately left the flag
here, reasoning that a prerelease gate values predictability over
minutes. That reasoning was wrong — the flag is what made the gate
unpredictable.
Browsers are now cached per package-lock hash in smoke, golden,
performance_smoke and the full performance run; installation happens only
on a cache miss and no longer touches apt. performance_smoke keeps
headroom for a cold cache at 20 minutes. If the image ever drops a
required library, Chromium fails to launch with a clear missing-libraries
error; that is the moment to bring the flag back.
Issue: #206
User-Visible: no
Sergey Matyunin