Ah, OK. BTW, while Gradle doesn't enforce it, even tasks that directly touch the filesystem may (and should) declare their inputs (that can be files or other tasks) and outputs[1] so that their freshness can be evaluated. All default tasks (like compilation), do that out of the box.

[1]: 15.9 in https://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/more_about_tas...