ADR-044 — Change-aware validation in the inner loop only, decided by rules in code

Status: accepted (2026-10-25, spec 103)

Context

A build or ship reruns the whole test suite and the security scan on every fix round, even when a change touches one module or only documentation. On larger repos this is most of a fix round’s time and a large share of its tokens (test output read back by agents). Skipping checks is risky: a missed failure costs more than a saved run.

Decision

• Selection applies only to the inner loop (build after coders, fix rounds). The final gate before a PR is marked ready or landed, and the PR’s CI, always run the full devbox run ci.
• A deterministic planner (cplat validate) decides per check run, reused or skipped with a named rule. Mandatory categories (dependencies, Dockerfile, CI, secrets/auth, specs, acceptance tests, and per shape API, migrations, manifests, routes, build config) force the full suite and the security scan. Anything not covered by a rule runs everything. A model’s risk estimate can only add checks.
• Mapping comes from what the repo already declares: plan task files → covers → criterion-tagged tests, and the component’s own unit tests by name. No dependency graph.
• Passed results are reused only for byte-identical inputs and only on the machine that produced them.
• Every skip or reuse that the final gate later contradicts is counted as a miss for its rule, so a bad rule is visible in cplat runs report.

Consequences

• Shapes without a test selector (Java, Go, gitops-app) run everything in the loop, as before.
• The final gate’s cost is unchanged; the saving is in fix rounds only.