# Reorder the pipeline so the cheapest gate fails first

A pipeline that spends ten minutes before catching a formatting error, reordered cheapest first.

Category: Pipeline speed and cost
Source: https://letsship.ai/use-cases/reorder-the-pipeline-to-fail-fast
Published: 2026-08-25

## Goal

Reorder pipeline stages so the cheapest checks run first.

## Acceptance criteria

- Cheap checks run before expensive ones
- Time to failure is measured on a deliberately failing commit
- Total time for a passing run is not made worse
- Independent jobs still run in parallel

## What lands as proof

Time-to-failure measured on a seeded failure, which is the number this change actually improves.

## Prompt

Copy this to an agent to open the ticket:

```text
Create a Linear issue in my team and assign it to the SHIP agent.

Title: Reorder {workflow} to fail fast

Description: Reorder pipeline stages so the cheapest checks run first.

Acceptance criteria:
- Cheap checks run before expensive ones
- Time to failure is measured on a deliberately failing commit
- Total time for a passing run is not made worse
- Independent jobs still run in parallel

Before you create the issue, read this repository's pipeline order and time how long a lint failure currently takes to surface. Replace {workflow}.
```

## Questions

### What does the agent actually change?

The ticket is scoped to one outcome: reorder pipeline stages so the cheapest checks run first. Work that serves that outcome is in scope, and anything outside it is left for a separate ticket, so the pull request stays reviewable.

### How do I know the work is done?

The pull request carries the evidence, not only the diff. Here that means timing measured on a deliberately failing commit, so a reviewer can confirm the result without reproducing the work locally.

### How much oversight does this need?

The run stops for the plan, and the review bar is raised afterwards so that smaller suggestions block the merge too, not only serious findings.