[CI Energy Waste]: Optimize CI workflow by consolidating redundant jobs

[souhailaS]

Change context

The CI workflow consumed more than 514 days of compute time (≈740,000 minutes) across all runners in the past year alone. Many jobs included redundant steps such as checkout, setup-node, and npm ci that repeated across 12 separate jobs. For example, npm ci alone was run up to 13 times. These redundant setup steps add unnecessary overhead and can each take up to 1–1.5 minutes, inflating overall runtime. For instance, only one simple checkout in one job can take up to 20s of runtime:

Change details

Changes Made

• Merged lint + knip + format into quality-checks
• Merged typecheck + misc + self-check into build-and-validate

Results

• 12 jobs → 8 jobs (33% reduction)
• 12 fewer setup steps per CI run
• Zero functionality lost

Redundant steps eliminated

4x actions/checkout
4x actions/setup-node
4x npm ci

Additional context

We are a team of researchers from University of Zurich (https://www.ifi.uzh.ch/en/zest.html) currently working on automating energy optimizations in GitHub Actions workflows. This optimization maintains full functionality while reducing computational overhead and energy consumption.

[email protected]

[typescript-bot]

This PR doesn't have any linked issues. Please open an issue that references this PR. From there we can discuss and prioritise.

[typescript-bot]

This PR doesn't have any linked issues. Please open an issue that references this PR. From there we can discuss and prioritise.

[jakebailey]

This optimization maintains full functionality while reducing computational overhead and energy consumption.

The point of having these jobs separated was that so PRs with multiple differing failures get each issue reported separately. Otherwise, PRs with multiple problems will have things fixed, then pushed, rerun everything, then another thing breaks, then that's fixed, and so on, as opposed to all problems being given up front. It's a lot less taxing for people who don't know to (or forget to) run all of the random checks in the repo, and for us to keep re-approving workflows or re-reviewing PRs.

[souhailaS]

Thank for your review.
I see, makes sense. Wouldn't this be fixed by a continue-on-error: true? and some nice logging in a reporting step with the details of which step has failed.
Adding a reporting step would be cheaper than a re-checkout

[souhailaS]

I just pushed the fix I meant

[Copilot]

Pull Request Overview

This PR reduces CI energy waste by consolidating redundant jobs into fewer, more efficient workflows.

• Merged lint, knip, and format jobs into a single quality-checks job
• Combined typecheck, misc, and self-check into a unified build-and-validate job
• Kept a single baselines job and removed duplicate setup steps

Comments suppressed due to low confidence (2)

.github/workflows/ci.yml:104

• The consolidated quality-checks job is missing the actions/checkout and actions/setup-node (and optional npm ci) steps. You need these initial steps to ensure the repository is checked out and Node is set up before running lint, knip, and dprint.

  quality-checks:

.github/workflows/ci.yml:167

• The build-and-validate job starts with npm ci but does not include an actions/checkout or actions/setup-node step. Without checking out the repo and setting up Node, the build commands will fail.

  build-and-validate:

[jakebailey]

Possibly, but as you saw, it's tedious/error-prone to get right since you have to restate the list of continue-on-error'd steps.

All-in-all, these particular changes seem a little bit like small beans compared to the incidental removal of extra macOS jobs done in #61978, for example, and we're likely going to be able to reduce the (actually impactful) matrix size likely soon by dropping old versions of Node.

I'll note that the diff is a lot larger than it needs to be since the baselines job has shifted position.

[RyanCavanaugh]

We're not accepting unapproved changes, especially infrastructure-related, at this time. Please review CONTRIBUTING.md for guidance. Thanks!