# 📦 WP-162 — `ci: the golden sweep leaves the commit path`

> Engineering log · [Phase 15 — Audit remediation, v0.8.0](https://borda.github.io/lucid-YOLO/engineering/phase-15-audit-remediation/)
>
> 🔗 Depends on [WP-160](https://borda.github.io/lucid-YOLO/work_packages/wp-160/) · Needed by none
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> ⬅️ [WP-161](https://borda.github.io/lucid-YOLO/work_packages/wp-161/) · [Roadmap](https://borda.github.io/lucid-YOLO/ROADMAP/) · [WP-163](https://borda.github.io/lucid-YOLO/work_packages/wp-163/) ➡️


## WP-162 — what "cheap enough" was worth, measured

<a id="wp-162"></a>

[WP-130b](https://borda.github.io/lucid-YOLO/work_packages/wp-130b/) moved `golden-check` and `release-guard` from `stages: [manual]` to `[pre-commit, manual]` so that `pre-commit run --all-files` would exercise every hook rather than most of them, and justified both with one sentence: "cheap enough off a release tag". For `release-guard` that is exactly right — off a tag it resolves `git describe`, finds no tag and exits. For `golden-check` it was an estimate nobody checked. Measured: **34.6 s wall, 65 s CPU**, on every commit, and twice per `make gate` — once inside `precommit`, once through the `golden` target. [WP-130b](https://borda.github.io/lucid-YOLO/work_packages/wp-130b/)'s own comment recorded that double invocation as an accepted trade; what it did not have was the size of it.

**The duplication is the argument, not the runtime.** A 34-second hook that found something the gate does not would be worth its cost. This one recomputes the same 43 goldens that `make golden` recomputes, and `make gate` — `precommit test golden` — is the merge bar every commit in this repository has to pass anyway. So the commit-stage copy could never fail where the gate passed. `.pre-commit-config.yaml` is the linting-and-quick-checks surface; a full metric recomputation is a gate step wearing a hook's clothes, and `stages: [manual]` puts it back where [WP-130](https://borda.github.io/lucid-YOLO/work_packages/wp-130/) first had it while keeping the standalone `pre-commit run --hook-stage manual golden-check` path intact.

**What the stage change would have broken, and why the row is two files rather than one.** `lint.yml` runs `pre-commit run --all-files`, and that run was CI's *only* full 43/43 sweep — `ci-tests.yml` runs pytest, whose golden-touching suites (`tests/models/test_param_flops.py`, `tests/assign/test_assignment_goldens.py`, `tests/data/test_data_goldens.py`, `tests/optim/test_toy_convergence.py`) import the harness for specific goldens rather than sweeping all of them. Dropping the stage alone would have taken the sweep out of CI entirely and left a green pipeline saying nothing about the goldens. The harness therefore lands as its own `ci-tests.yml` step, in the job that runs the suite rather than back in the linting job, because recomputing model metrics is test-shaped work.

The trade [WP-130b](https://borda.github.io/lucid-YOLO/work_packages/wp-130b/) accepted is withdrawn rather than overturned: `--all-files` no longer exercises literally every hook, which is a real and small loss, and the thing bought back is that the gate stops paying for the same 43 goldens twice and a commit stops paying for them at all. `release-guard` keeps `[pre-commit, manual]` — its half of that sentence was never in question.