why do we have a format step before the build?

This step takes almost 8 minutes and because our story around python caching is great, we are doing the same thing when we actually build

I think it’s trading a couple min of overhead for a very long time to know formatting worked.

What we should do to get the best of both worlds is to make the check an optional Gradle step we specify in CI

Then we guarantee we aren’t duplicating work and it also fails fast.

This takes upwards of 7 min which isn't trivial.