I saved about four CI minutes per pull request and lost two weeks of merges. The change was one line. Our backend test workflow ran on every PR, including the ones that only touched a README, so I added a paths filter. Docs PRs stopped burning runner time. Then they stopped merging. Twenty-three pull requests piled up with a yellow dot and the message "Expected — Waiting for status to be reported" , and nothing was ever going to report. This post covers what a GitHub Actions paths filte...