Does Intellij / Android Studio not use Gradle's dependency cache? It seems like when I sync the IDE it downloads all of the artifacts again even if: 1. Already downloaded those artifacts when building with Gradle on the command line before that 2. Another project already downloaded those artifacts I've been noticing this with Jetbrain's Compose since there are a ton of artifacts, and their Maven repo is relatively slow.

Are you sure it is not downloading the source / javadoc jars? It should reuse them, yes, it just asks Gradle "give me the set of dependencies".

Hmm I'll check next time it happens. It looked like it was downloading everything, but there was a lot of text so I'll pay more attention.

it runs HEAD checks against every artifact. so it looks like it's "downloading everything" but it isn't really

My OP wasn't so clear. I only noticed it after a version update, so the sequence is: 1. Update Compose 2. Build with Gradle on command line 3. Sync IDE 4. Relatively slow process of "something" making a lot of network requests to Jetbrains' dev repo 5. Do 1-3 in another project with the same new version of Compose 6. Observe the same thing as 4 7. Further syncs on those projects don't do this (until the next version update)

Are you in Gradle 8.10.0? It has a severe regression in dependencies download that is quite noticeable in the IDE sync . But you shouldn't update to the .1 patch neither. So you should probably downgrade to 8.9.x https://docs.gradle.org/8.10.1/release-notes.html

I am, but I've been noticing this for a while already (probably 6 months to a year).