Check out only the gate’s script
Give a small aggregation job a sparse checkout of the files it reads.
How Stripe used this technique
Read what Stripe changed and follow the original sources.
Check out only the gate’s script
Sorbet’s all-succeeded job switched to a sparse checkout of its CI scripts directory, on an agent that already had the sparse-checkout plugin installed. On GitHub Actions the equivalent is actions/checkout with sparse-checkout listing every script and local action the gate reads.
Before the change the step took 27 seconds, 25 of them cloning the repository. Source
- Use it when
- A small aggregation job spends most of its time cloning unrelated source.
- Before applying it
- Include every transitive script and local action in the sparse set, and keep the gate’s complete success logic.
Company Playbooks
- Read Anthropic’s playbookRun only affected tests
- Read DoorDash’s playbookRun build and test in parallel, sharded across CI agents
- Read Linear’s playbookBenchmark the same job on faster hardware
- Read Mastra’s playbookStarSling runners for the slowest test workflow
- Read OpenAI’s playbookRank CI fixes by the minutes they save
- Read Ramp’s playbookMove a CPU-bound test suite to a faster CPU
- Read Shopify’s playbookLet an agent iterate against one CI metric
- Read Spotify’s playbookBuild arm64 on native arm64 runners
- Read Stripe’s playbookRun only the tests a change can reach
- Read Uber’s playbookBuild the merge-queue speculations most likely to be needed