This polly is closed. @broad-processor-92400 has a polly for you!

4. I haven't experienced the new process yet.

(added)

I have some feedback now.. and this may not be a big issue, just raising it early, and that is merge conflict over the notes file. It's manageable if we exclude notes from triggering too much CI to run, but my worry is that if I have a good PR that is approved and ready to go, and I just need to fix the merge conflict on the notes file, it'll trigger another full CI run, which can take close to an hour to complete.. that's going to be a pain in the neck (not to mention being rather wasteful on resources).

Yeah, merge conflicts are definitely noticeable. I guess theoretically caching should help… but in practice it’s very easy to invalidate the cache (ie rerun everything). I think the “towncrier” approach called out in https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/20850 “future work” might be a way to eliminate the conflicts, or, as you say, maybe we could make the CI run itself faster