Speeding Up CI: The 'Detect' Job Pattern
I still recall the sting of watching our build pipeline grind through a costly set of checks. It burned minutes of compute. Then it just said: "No relevant changes found. Nothing to audit." It was for a small doc change, a quick typo fix. Yet our system ran a full identity check, pulled private reviewer data, and spun up a Go setup. All that, to confirm its helm chart linter had nothing to do. Multiply that across dozens of pull requests a day, and the hidden cost of wasted CI work adds up fast. That moment pushed us to rethink how we gated our priciest checks.