perf(ci): narrow the two PR workflows CLOUD-180's scope missed, and gate the absence

[wenzowski]

The overhead layer under the CI bill: small per run, paid on every run, owned by nobody until now.

What was measured

commit-lint.yml and zizmor.yml were installing all 28 pinned [tools] entries on every PR push — rust, zig, node, serena's 72 Python packages, prettier, renovate, uv, pkl and 18 aqua binaries — to run a commit-subject predicate and one static analyzer. CLOUD-180 fixed exactly this problem and its Done section scoped the fix precisely: "per-job install_args in ci.yml, with auto-install off so the lists bind." These two workflows were never in that scope.

The narrowing

commit-lint takes rust: its two dependencies are cargo run -p batten, and signing-posture uses only git, gpg and ssh-keygen, none of them pinned here. zizmor takes the analyzer plus jq — the task body is step-receipt check zizmor first, and that reads mise tasks info --json before deciding whether to run the analyzer at all.

Both also gain MISE_TASK_RUN_AUTO_INSTALL and MISE_EXEC_AUTO_INSTALL. Without them a narrowed list is decorative: mise re-installs the rest at task time, which is the net-zero CLOUD-180 measured in the cross job — rust in 13s, then the whole toolchain rebuilt inside the work step, invisible because that step does get faster.

The gate half

ci-tools-check could not have caught this. It asserts every name in a list resolves to a [tools] key, so a workflow declaring no list has nothing to judge and passes — a hole in the trigger, not the predicate. It now also asks the other direction over the workflow directory: every pull_request workflow running the mise action carries one list per use, and sets both auto-install variables to false.

The binding check reads the assignment and its value, not the variable name. A substring search would pass a workflow whose only occurrence is the comment explaining why the variable matters, and would pass one that sets it to "true" — the same hole wearing a fix's clothing.

Scheduled and workflow_run workflows are deliberately out of scope: not on the PR path, and widening to them is a different cost decision.

Two more measured items

• final's analyzer retry backs off — 2, 4, 8, 16, capped at 20 — instead of a flat 10s. final is the last job, so this is wall clock on the PR, and the old shape paid a 10s floor before the first retry even though the analyzer's measured latency is 12s from push. Ceiling is 50s either way; six tries and "an exhausted 3 FAILS" unchanged.
• Both bot lanes go hourly. auto-bot-land ran 5,35 and auto-release-land ran */30 — 96 ticks/day, and GitHub bills every job rounded up to the whole minute, so idle ticks floored at ~2,900 billed min/month for work that resolves nothing. Both are workflow_run-driven first; both comments already accepted the latency trade in their own words.

What I did not change, and why

commit-lint's fetch-depth: 0 stays. The history is 992 commits in 19MB, so a full clone is about a second, while a bounded depth puts the base sha near a shallow graft for the range commit-check judges. A second saved is not worth putting a gate's input that close to its own boundary. CLOUD-812's acceptance clause for it is amended by that measurement rather than met.

Verification

• ci-tools-check green on the committed tree; shown red by hand in all three directions (no list, no variables, a variable set to "true") against fixture copies.
• tests/ci-tools-check.bats 17/17.
• ci-tools-check joins MUTANT_GATES; mutant reports both new declarations caught, so the arms are proven to discriminate rather than asserted to.
• attribution-check, ci-local-parity, timeout-check, actionlint, shellcheck, taplo, shfmt green through the pre-commit tier.

One thing about the claim, stated rather than ridden

This row was refined earlier in the same conversation. The container restarted at 02:02 and re-stamped session-start, so claim-check passed refined-this-session on its own — that is CLOUD-615's hole, not a real separation of sessions. The refinement was reviewed by the repo owner, who corrected two workstreams and chose minutes over wall clock, which is the substance the rule asks for and the part the mechanism cannot see.

Closes CLOUD-812

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Generated by Claude Code

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Workflow Improvements

  • Scheduled automation now runs hourly, reducing unnecessary processing.
  • External analysis retries now use progressive delays while preserving existing retry limits and failure handling.
  • Tool installation in validation workflows is now explicit, improving consistency and predictability.

• Bug Fixes

  • Added checks to ensure pull-request workflows declare required tools and installation settings.

• Tests

  • Added coverage for missing or improperly configured workflow tool declarations.

[linear-code]

CLOUD-812 CLOUD-180's narrowing stopped at `ci.yml`, so two PR workflows still install all 28 tools on every push — and 96 idle cron ticks/day floor at ~2,900 billed min/month

Why

CLOUD-180 measured the fixed-overhead problem and fixed it. Its Done list scopes the fix precisely: "Per-job install_args in ci.yml, with auto-install off so the lists bind." Two pull_request workflows were never in that scope, and both still pay the whole cost on every PR push.

Measured 2026-08-20 on origin/main:

• commit-lint.yml:80-81 — actions/checkout with fetch-depth: 0 (full history), then jdx/mise-action with no install_args, to run a commit-subject regex. mise.toml pins 28 [tools] entries: rust, zig, node, npm:renovate, npm:prettier, pipx:serena-agent, pipx:ntia-conformance-checker, uv, pkl and 18 aqua/github binaries.
• zizmor.yml:103 — the same shape, to run one static analyzer.
• MISE_TASK_RUN_AUTO_INSTALL and MISE_EXEC_AUTO_INSTALL are set only in ci.yml:39-40.

That last line is the load-bearing one, and CLOUD-180's own Revisit when section predicted it: "MISE_TASK_RUN_AUTO_INSTALL or MISE_EXEC_AUTO_INSTALL is removed or defaulted back on: the toolchain silently returns to every job at task time, with nothing going red." In these two workflows the variables were never present, so there is nothing for a narrowed list to bind against even if one were added. CLOUD-180 measured what that costs when it is missed: the cross job installed rust in 13s and then rebuilt serena's 72 Python packages, node, zig and prettier inside the work step, "invisible in the step being optimised, because that step does get faster."

ci-tools-check does not catch this either. It asserts every name in an install_args list resolves to a [tools] key — a list that does not exist cannot fail it. The gate is sound; its trigger is absence-blind.

The second cost, on a different axis: idle scheduled ticks.

• auto-bot-land.yml — cron: "5,35 * * * *", 48/day
• auto-release-land.yml — cron: "*/30 * * * *", 48/day

Both job-level if: conditions admit schedule unconditionally, so a scheduled tick always allocates a runner even when it stops at the resolve step. auto-release-land.yml's own comment accepts this — "a cron tick with no release PR open … stops here, before the checkout, so an idle tick is a few seconds of runner and nothing else" — and the arithmetic it does not carry is that GitHub bills every job rounded up to the whole minute. 96 ticks/day is a floor of ~2,900 billed min/month for work that resolves nothing. Both lanes are also workflow_run-driven, so the cron is a backstop rather than the primary path.

Third, on the wall-clock axis: ci.yml:862-868 runs sleep 10 up to 6 times in final, which is the last job in the run, so up to 60s of paid wait sits directly on every PR's wall clock. The bounded-retry posture is right and its "an exhausted 3 FAILS" rule must not change; only the interval shape is at issue, and the analyzer's own measured latency is 12s from push (ci.yml:845-847).

The ledger this sits in, so the rows can be ranked against each other. Measured on run 32395938706, per non-draft PR event, billed minutes: windows 22.10 (50.6%, a 2× runner), ci 15.05, darwin-link 2.25, semver 1.87, cross 1.60, perf 0.50, final 0.33 — 43.70 total. At ~179 ci.yml runs/day of which ~36% execute, that is ~85,000 billed min/month. The items in this issue are the overhead layer beneath that: small per run, paid on every run, and owned by nobody.

Refinement — Ready (extend a landed narrowing to the workflows it did not reach, and gate the absence)

• Source of truth (§1). The workflow files themselves and mise.toml's [tools] table. The billed-minute figures come from the workflow run history, not from a number a human types.
• Mechanism as a computable predicate (§2). Narrow both workflows to the tools they invoke and set both auto-install variables so the lists bind — the shape CLOUD-180 established, applied to two files it did not touch. Then close the absence hole that let this persist: ci-tools-check gains a second direction, so a pull_request workflow that runs jdx/mise-action with no install_args is a refusal rather than a silent pass. That is what makes this not recur in the next workflow added.
• Deliberately not in scope (§2). The job graph and the path filters — CLOUD-398 owns those and its slice 2 already covers the four Rust jobs. The timeout budgets — CLOUD-352. The windows job's command — CLOUD-662. This issue is the overhead layer only.
• Effect (§3). read for the gate; the workflow edits change no verb and no command surface.
• Output and exit (§5). Pointer-only: the workflow path and the job name that declares no list. Never the tool set, never a log.
• Commit / bump (§6). perf(ci) — no bump.
• Test obligation (§7). tests/ci-tools-check.bats, both directions and mutation-checked per CLOUD-418: a workflow with a narrowed list passes; one running mise-action with no install_args fails; one that declares a list but omits the auto-install variables fails, because a non-binding list is the failure CLOUD-180 measured and is indistinguishable from a fix by reading. The middle case is the one that fails against today's gate.
• Blockers (§8). None. relatedTo CLOUD-180 (the landed predecessor whose scope this extends, and whose Revisit when clause names this failure), CLOUD-398 (the job-graph half of the same cost picture), CLOUD-352 (which makes this class of drift visible instead of silent).

Acceptance

• commit-lint and zizmor install only the tools they invoke, with both auto-install variables set so the lists bind.
• A pull_request workflow added with no install_args is red before CI, and shown able to fail.
• A declared list with the auto-install variables absent is red — the non-binding case CLOUD-180 measured.
• commit-lint's clone is reduced to the commit range it reads rather than full history.
• The scheduled cadence of the two bot lanes is a recorded decision against the whole-minute rounding, whichever way it goes.
• final's retry reaches its verdict without a fixed 10s floor per attempt, and an exhausted non-answer still fails.

CLOUD-180 CI installs the whole toolchain in every job, so the critical path is mostly fixed overhead

Why

Every ci.yml job ran mise install over all 18 [tools]. On an 83s run, ~40s elapsed before any gate ran, and mise install was the largest single block in each job.

Per-tool completion times, extracted from the ci job log (installs run concurrently; seconds after mise install --locked began):

17.3s  zig            <- the pole; only darwin-link invokes it
13.9s  rust
 6.7s  pipx:serena-agent   <- no CI job uses it
 5.6s  npm:prettier    4.7s  node
 2.7s  pkl   2.3s  uv   2.1s  zizmor   1.9s  cargo-zigbuild
 1.7s  gh    1.1s  release-plz   <=0.7s  hk, shellcheck, taplo, actionlint, shfmt, jq, cargo-deny

zig finishes last, so zig alone set the install wall clock in all four jobs — and three of them never invoke it. serena, release-plz, gh and uv were installed in every job and used by none.

Two adjacent costs on the same path: doctor is a dependency of test:bats, so the ci job downloaded two rustup std libs in order to run bats; and darwin-link ran a matrix leg per Darwin triple, ~34s each, both on the critical path.

job	queue+setup+checkout	mise install	rust-cache	work	total
ci	~7s	25s	3s	31s	67s
cross	~11s	23s	1s	16s	46s
darwin-link (aarch64)	~7s	24s	2s	34s	67s
darwin-link (x86_64)	~8s	25s	1s	36s	69s
final	~8s	—	—	1s	11s

Mechanism

• install_args per job on jdx/mise-action: ci takes the hk gate's tools plus cargo-deny; cross takes rust; darwin-link takes rust zig ubi:rust-cross/cargo-zigbuild. Lists stay one-line scalars — several tool names begin with aqua:, which reads as a key inside a YAML block scalar.
• MISE_TASK_RUN_AUTO_INSTALL=false and MISE_EXEC_AUTO_INSTALL=false at workflow level. Without these the narrowing does nothing. mise auto-installs missing tools when a task runs and when mise exec needs one, both defaulting true, so a narrowed install list moves the cost into the work step instead of removing it. Measured: the cross job installed rust in 13s and then rebuilt the entire toolchain — serena's 72 Python packages, node, zig, prettier — inside mise run cross-check, its work step going 21s → 32s while the install step shrank by about the same. The failure is invisible in the step being optimised, because that step does get faster.
• DOCTOR_TARGETS per job. doctor reads ${DOCTOR_TARGETS-…} rather than :-, so an explicitly empty value means "no rust targets"; with :- there was no way to ask for zero.
• darwin-link matrix reduced to aarch64-apple-darwin. The gate asserts nothing in the dependency graph pulls in an Apple SDK — a property of the graph, not the word size. release-artifacts.yml builds both Darwin targets through zigbuild, so an x86_64-only linker problem still cannot reach a shipped artifact.

Gate

mise run ci-tools-check — every tool named in an install_args list must resolve to a [tools] entry in mise.toml. mise install does not error on an unknown tool name, so drift between the two files would otherwise surface later as command not found. Takes both paths as arguments so tests/ci-tools-check.bats drives it against fixtures. Wired into the shared gate in hk.pkl.

Result

	wall	jobs	billed	mise install per job
before	83s	5	252s	25 / 23 / 24 / 25
after	65s	4	134s	18 / 13 / 20

Cleanly attributable: mise install down 28–46% per job, and one job fewer.

The wall-clock and billed columns are not a clean comparison. The "after" run restored a warm rust-cache while the baseline ran cold, so most of the work-step drop is CLOUD-176's cache rather than this change. A cold run with the fix lands between 100s and 65s; it was not measured. The baseline also predates doctor landing, which added ~10s per run on its own.

Done

• Per-job install_args in ci.yml, with auto-install off so the lists bind
• ci-tools-check green and covering both drift directions
• mise install step under 21s in every job
• Four jobs, final still gating on ci, cross, darwin-link

Not doing

Base-branch cache warming — costed in CLOUD-176 and recommended against (~178s of job-time per merge to save ~60s on one PR's first run).

Removing the final fan-in job — its ~11s tail buys single-status branch protection, so adding a job never requires a ruleset change.

Folding cross into ci — saves a runner but serializes 16s onto the 31s job, making ci the new pole.

Aligning clippy and test feature flags to share artifacts — crates/batten has no [features], so --all-features is already a no-op and the two compiles already share dependency artifacts.

Revisit when

MISE_TASK_RUN_AUTO_INSTALL or MISE_EXEC_AUTO_INSTALL is removed or defaulted back on: the toolchain silently returns to every job at task time, with nothing going red.

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The pull request changes workflow schedules and retry timing, makes mise tool installation explicit in CI workflows, and extends ci-tools-check to validate pull-request workflow bindings with regression coverage.

Changes

CI workflow controls

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Workflow schedules and retry timing .github/workflows/auto-bot-land.yml, .github/workflows/auto-release-land.yml, .github/workflows/ci.yml	Scheduled workflows now run hourly. External analyzer retries use delays of 2, 4, 8, 16, and up to 20 seconds while retaining six attempts.
Explicit mise installation .github/workflows/commit-lint.yml, .github/workflows/zizmor.yml	The workflows disable mise auto-installation and declare the required tools through install_args.
Pull-request workflow binding validation mise-tasks/ci-tools-check, mise.toml, tests/ci-tools-check.bats	ci-tools-check validates mise-action install lists and auto-install settings in pull-request workflows. The gate configuration and Bats tests cover valid, invalid, and out-of-scope workflows.

Estimated code review effort: 3 (Moderate) | ~20 minutes

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to 88573

The PR narrows PR workflow tool installation, adds configuration gates, backs off analyzer retries, and reduces bot scheduling overhead; no actionable merge-blocking risk remains after normal checks and review.

Sequence Diagram(s)

sequenceDiagram
  participant MUTANT_GATES
  participant ci-tools-check
  participant PRWorkflowFiles
  MUTANT_GATES->>ci-tools-check: run validation gate
  ci-tools-check->>PRWorkflowFiles: scan pull-request workflows
  PRWorkflowFiles-->>ci-tools-check: return mise-action and auto-install declarations
  ci-tools-check-->>MUTANT_GATES: report pass or failure

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🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4 | ❌ 1

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name	Status	Explanation	Resolution
Docstring Coverage	⚠️ Warning	Docstring coverage is 50.00% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 2 functions across 1 files. (7 skipped: 7 unsupported.)	Write docstrings for the functions missing them to satisfy the coverage threshold.

✅ Passed checks (4 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly identifies the main CI changes: narrowing tool installation in two pull-request workflows and enforcing absence of automatic installation.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

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Inline comments:
In `@mise-tasks/ci-tools-check`:
- Around line 151-173: Update the workflow scanning logic in
mise-tasks/ci-tools-check at lines 151-173 to parse both .yml and .yaml files
structurally, recognize flow-style pull_request triggers, and associate
install_args plus effective MISE_TASK_RUN_AUTO_INSTALL and
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rather than counting file-wide matches. Add fixtures covering these cases in
tests/ci-tools-check.bats at lines 170-245.

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