Fast-lane guards

The “fast lane” is every test collected under pytest -m fast (excluding slow/stress/resource_heavy/live_integration) – the required, sub-few-minutes suite every develop PR runs in code-test (.github/workflows/ci.yml).

No test-count ceiling

There is no limit on how many tests the fast lane may collect. The code-test job’s timeout-minutes cap bounds the lane’s cost directly.

Marker and path guards

A guard script stops the wrong kind of test from entering the lane. It reads the fast-lane policy file:

• forbidden_marker_expressions: for each expression, the script collects pytest -m "fast and <expression>". A non-empty selection is a FAST_LANE_VIOLATION (currently resource_heavy, stress and live_integration).
• forbidden_path_substrings: any fast-lane test whose node ID contains one of these substrings is a FAST_LANE_VIOLATION. The list is empty today.
• enabled: set to false to switch the guards off.

The guards run as guard-fast-lane-markers in the code-lint job of ci.yml, in lint.yml for release branches, in make ci-lint, and in the timing-policy-fast-lane pre-push hook, all with --strict. If pytest cannot collect, the script reports FAST_LANE_ENVIRONMENT_ERROR instead of a violation, because nothing is known to be wrong with the lane; run it from the project environment (for example through make ci-lint). To fix a violation, remove the forbidden marker from the test or move the test out of the fast tier.

Medium tier

The medium-test job in .github/workflows/ci.yml splits the medium tier across four Linux runners. Its timeout-minutes (25 minutes) is a hard cancel that backstops a hung tier, not a policy check. make test-medium runs the full medium suite locally.