What checks belong in a useful CI pipeline for a web service?

Run fast feedback first: formatting or linting where useful, compilation or type checks, focused unit tests, and integration checks for important boundaries. Build a reproducible artifact and apply appropriate dependency, secret, and image checks. Keep credentials scoped and avoid trusting unreviewed contributions with privileged deployment secrets. Publish useful failure output without leaking sensitive values. Separate artifact creation from environment deployment and track which commit produced each release. A pipeline should enforce meaningful quality signals, not simply collect a large number of slow, redundant checks.