Use a shallow checkout in GitHub Actions

actions/checkout runs at its default depth of 1, a single commit, for the vast majority of jobs. When a job needs the PR diff, fetch-depth: 2 is enough. Full history (fetch-depth: 0) is reserved for the specific jobs that actually need it: release-notes generation, git blame, or tools that walk tags.1

# Most jobs: the default fetches only the commit under test
- uses: actions/checkout@v4

# Need the PR diff? Depth 2 is enough, not the whole history
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
  with:
    fetch-depth: 2

Every run downloads the entire history, even though the job only needs the latest commit.

- uses: actions/checkout@v4
  with:
    fetch-depth: 0   # clones the ENTIRE git history, slow on large repos

On a repo with a long history, fetch-depth: 0 downloads far more than the job needs, and it pays that cost on every run. The default shallow fetch is often the single easiest checkout win. The fix is safe as long as you keep full history on the few jobs that require it.

Hand this prompt to your coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, and the like) to audit and fix this practice in your own repo.

Inspect this repo's .github/workflows for `fetch-depth` on `actions/checkout`. Find every step that sets `fetch-depth: 0` (full history) and, for each, determine whether the job actually needs history: changelog or release tooling, `git blame`, `git describe`, or anything that walks tags. If nothing in the job needs history, remove the `fetch-depth: 0` (back to the default shallow depth of 1), or drop it to `fetch-depth: 2` when only a parent diff is needed. Leave jobs that genuinely need full history untouched. Show me the diff and open a PR rather than applying it blindly.