Gradle has added support for incremental compilation for annotation processors. See gradle/gradle#1320 and the documentation about it.

#1414 is just one step. With this issue the idea is to add the required bits in META-INF that Gradle needs to consider our annotation processor as capable of incremental compilation.

The only thing that we could cause a full rebuild is when the SPI files are generated. However, I think that this is rarely used. If there are some people that explicitly enable this via the property or are using a customized package or a custom name for the mappers with the default componentModel please let us know.