Reject irrelevant events before allocating runners

Put event and change conditions before runner allocation so irrelevant comments or edits do not start expensive jobs.

Prompt

Evaluate and apply this CI technique to my repository: Reject irrelevant events before allocating runners.

Put event and change conditions before runner allocation so irrelevant comments or edits do not start expensive jobs.

Read the technique and its source-backed company examples: https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/techniques/gate-irrelevant-events.md

Inspect this repository’s CI workflows, build and test commands, dependencies, and recent run timings. Identify where this technique applies and explain the expected benefit using this repository’s evidence.
Measure a baseline from recent comparable runs: elapsed time, queue time, runner minutes and failures where available. If data is unavailable, say what cannot be measured.
Compare relevant company approaches, checking prerequisites, platform differences and tradeoffs. Rank applicable options by evidence, fit and measurable opportunity; do not present company results as predictions for this repo.
Recommend the smallest safe change, show what checks and fallback paths remain, and ASK ME WHICH CHANGE TO APPROVE BEFORE EDITING ANY FILES.
Only after approval, work on a new feature branch, make one reversible change, and open a reviewable pull request. Never merge or push to a default or protected branch.
Keep required checks, test coverage, deployment and release behavior intact. Validate the change and compare equivalent runs where possible; report limitations and what should be monitored after merge.

View all playbooks

How companies used this technique

Read what each company changed and follow the original sources.

Do not start a runner for irrelevant comments

Mastra gated the major-version job on the exact command in the new or previous comment body. This adapts the non-content-event recipe to issue_comment, preserving command removal as well as addition.

Use it when: Comment-triggered automation starts expensive checks for ordinary discussion.
Before applying it: Event matching and command parsing must agree. Preserve author authorization, edit/removal handling and fork trust, and keep permission checks separate from event filtering.

Keep metadata edits from restarting source validation

Codex Security skips its source checks on body-only PR edits, gives those events their own concurrency group, and renames the skipped aggregates. Title, base and combined edits still run full validation.

Body-only edits skip source validation in their own concurrency group Source

Use it when: Description-only edits rerun the same source checks or cancel an active run.
Before applying it: Title validators, retargets and metadata checks still need their events. A skipped run must never overwrite a failed, pending or missing required result.

Skip irrelevant jobs before allocating runners

The Agents SDK already classified each change in a preparation job. Linux and Windows packaging jobs now read that output in a job-level condition, and two explicit Linux jobs keep the versioned required check names when they skip. SDK changes and unknown diffs still run the tests.

Packaging jobs skip at job level for changes outside the SDK Source

Use it when: Expensive jobs start only to find that every useful step will skip.
Before applying it: Keep stable required check names and require the preparation job to succeed. An unknown diff runs the checks.

How companies used this technique

Do not start a runner for irrelevant comments

Keep metadata edits from restarting source validation

Skip irrelevant jobs before allocating runners

Related techniques

Run CI once per pull request commit

Cancel superseded pull request runs

Install and build only the workspace packages a job uses

Company Playbooks

Related guides

Cancel superseded CI runs

Build and test only what changed

Cut CI queue time

Filter workflows by changed files