Efficiency Patterns

Patterns for avoiding unnecessary work and ensuring safe retries.

Two Strategies

Idempotency makes reruns safe. Work avoidance prevents reruns entirely. Use both together for maximum efficiency.

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Overview

Efficiency patterns optimize what your automation does and whether it needs to do it.

Pattern	When to Use	Strategy
Idempotency	Operations may be retried	Same input = same result
Work Avoidance	Results can be cached	Skip if already done

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Decision Flow

flowchart TD
    A[Operation Request] --> B{Already done?}
    B -->|Yes| C[Work Avoidance: Skip]
    B -->|No| D{May be retried?}
    D -->|Yes| E[Idempotency: Safe retry]
    D -->|No| F[Execute normally]

    %% Ghostty Hardcore Theme
    style A fill:#65d9ef,color:#1b1d1e
    style B fill:#fd971e,color:#1b1d1e
    style C fill:#a7e22e,color:#1b1d1e
    style D fill:#fd971e,color:#1b1d1e
    style E fill:#a7e22e,color:#1b1d1e
    style F fill:#9e6ffe,color:#1b1d1e

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Quick Reference

Scenario	Pattern	Reasoning
Re-running same operation	Idempotency	Same result every time
Resource already exists	Idempotency	Create-or-update safely
Content unchanged	Work Avoidance	Skip unnecessary work
Build artifact cached	Work Avoidance	Reuse previous results

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Key Difference

Aspect	Idempotency	Work Avoidance
Goal	Safe to retry	Avoid doing work
Mechanism	Deterministic result	Change detection
Trade-off	Complexity vs reliability	Cache invalidation vs speed

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Idempotency makes retries safe. Work avoidance makes retries unnecessary.

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