The runners are self-hosted but checkout cleaned the workspace, so every step recompiled the same sources into its own binary from nothing; unit tests and e2e were 6 and 4 minutes on the ARM64 critical path, mostly compile. Zig's cache is content-addressed, so it now lives outside the workspace and warms across runs, in both workflows. The toolchain tarball is kept the same way and still verified against the pinned digest every run. Also pins the tag-ignore trigger the previous commit introduced, which the workflow pin test had rejected. check-in: 3106100d42 user: dmestas tags: trunk