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In an activated repository with AWS connected, a label can name the machine directly. No airship.yaml, no commit to it, nothing to review — change one line in a workflow and push.
This is for trying something: is this build actually faster on 32 cores? Once you know the answer, write it down in airship.yaml, where it is reviewed, shared and versioned with everything else.

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The label format

1

airship-aws-

The prefix. Only AWS has one-line runners.
2

The instance type, with dots as dashes

t2.large becomes t2-large; m7i.metal-24xl becomes m7i-metal-24xl. The family has to look like one of EC2’s — c7i, c7i-flex, u7i-12tb, mac2-m2 — so a typo is simply not a one-line runner rather than a launch that fails.
3

Optionally an image

ubuntu2204 (the default) or ubuntu2404.
4

Optionally spot

spot asks for spot capacity.
The image and spot tokens may come in either order, but only at the end. A label that puts them elsewhere is not a one-line runner, and the job is skipped with No runner serves the labels.

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What you get

Everything else — disks, caching, environment variables, private networking, idle pools, GPUs — needs a definition in airship.yaml.

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A definition always wins

If any definition’s labels include the same label, that definition is used instead. So you can introduce airship.yaml later without changing a single workflow file: name the definition’s label after the one-line label you were using, and the next job picks it up.
airship.yaml
A job that also asks for windows is never served by a one-line runner: the Ubuntu images are Linux. Windows needs a definition naming a Windows image.

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Still bounded

One-line runners obey everything else: the repository must be activated, max_runners still caps concurrency, the machine still destroys itself after one job, and the launch still shows up on Jobs, Runners and Events. What they skip is the review step. On a repository where that matters — a public one, or one where people should not be choosing 48xlarge machines casually — keep the shapes in airship.yaml and use access policies on the expensive ones.