Reorder the pipeline so the cheapest gate fails first
A pipeline that spends ten minutes before catching a formatting error, reordered cheapest first.
The ticket
Reorder pipeline stages so the cheapest checks run first.
Acceptance criteria
- Cheap checks run before expensive ones
- Time to failure is measured on a deliberately failing commit
- Total time for a passing run is not made worse
- Independent jobs still run in parallel
What lands as proof
Time-to-failure measured on a seeded failure, which is the number this change actually improves.
Why teams defer it
- Passing runs feel the same, so the benefit only shows up on the bad days.
- Serialising checks to fail fast can make successful runs slower, which is a real tradeoff.
Questions
- What does the agent actually change?
- The ticket is scoped to one outcome: reorder pipeline stages so the cheapest checks run first. Work that serves that outcome is in scope, and anything outside it is left for a separate ticket, so the pull request stays reviewable.
- How do I know the work is done?
- The pull request carries the evidence, not only the diff. Here that means timing measured on a deliberately failing commit, so a reviewer can confirm the result without reproducing the work locally.
- How much oversight does this need?
- The run stops for the plan, and the review bar is raised afterwards so that smaller suggestions block the merge too, not only serious findings.