Run only the smoke test for content-only PRs

[richardhjtan]

The live-test job takes ~28 minutes, and ~17 of those are the mock-realm acceptance suites (browse / create / install / remix / use). Those suites exercise catalog-app/**, commands/**, and tests/** against fixture-built realms — listing content cannot change their outcome, since catalog-app never imports listing folders. Yet most PRs to this repo are pure listing submissions.

This adds a scope decision to the live-test job:

• Content-only PRs (every changed file lives in a subdirectory outside the app-code paths — listing folders, taxonomy instances, screenshots) set LIVE_TEST_FILTER to run just the real-catalog-app smoke test plus the base-field-specs sanity check. The smoke test renders the actual realm serving the PR's content, so it is the test that guards shipped content — and the realm must still fully index everything before it runs, so catastrophic content breakage still fails the job. Expected duration: ~10 minutes instead of ~28.
• Everything else runs the full suite: any file under catalog-app/, commands/, fields/, tests/, .github/, or at the repo root (conservative default for unclassified files), and every push to main — so a misclassified path is caught right after merge at the latest.

LIVE_TEST_FILTER is the QUnit filter passthrough added to the host's testem-live.js in cardstack/boxel#5693. Until that merges, the env var is ignored and the full suite runs — the two changes are safe to land in either order.

Classifier checked against recent history: #683 (listing submission) and #688 (listing quality pass) → smoke tier; #690 and #694 (test/app changes) → full suite. This PR itself touches .github/, so its own CI run exercises the full-suite branch of the decision.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[github-actions]

Staging Submissions Preview

This PR's content is pushed to the staging submissions realm: https://realms-staging.stack.cards/submissions/

Changed folders:

• .github/

Updated at 2026-08-05 05:45:41 UTC for commit 87c4d6c. Shared realm: only this PR's changed files are pushed; files touched by multiple PRs reflect whichever pushed last, and deleted files are not removed.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR optimizes CI runtime by conditionally running a reduced “smoke tier” of the live tests for PRs that only change catalog content (e.g., listings, taxonomy instances, screenshots), while keeping the full live-test suite for app-code changes and for pushes to main.

Changes:

• Add a “Decide test scope” step that classifies PRs as content-only vs full-suite based on changed file paths.
• When classified as content-only, set LIVE_TEST_FILTER to run only the real-catalog-app smoke test plus the base-field-specs sanity check.

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