Repository permanency between stages in an Azure DevOps pipeline

I have an Azure DevOps pipeline with 3 stages in it.

Stage 1: Checkout the self repository. Create folders. Push the changes back to the repo

Stage 2: Checkout the self repository. Create files in the above mentioned folders. Push the changes.

Stage 3: Checkout the self repo. Read the previously created files.

My issue is that even though I push the changes back in Stage 1, when Stage 2 makes the checkout it cannot see these new folders.

So when I run my pipeline it creates the folders, but Stage 2 fails because it cannot see the folders. If I rerun the pipeline the folders are there, so Stage 2 can also succeed, create the files and push them, but Stage 3 won't see these files yet so it will fail. So, I have to run my pipeline 3 times to make it succeed.

It looks like even though the three stages run after one another, and I do separate checkout in all of them, somehow they still download the same initial version of the repository. So even though the checkout of Stage 2 happens after the push of Stage 1, Stage 2 still cannot see the changes made by Stage 1.

Is this a normal behavior? I assumed there are some caching that makes the stages use the same version of the files. If so, is it possible to change this behavior? I don't really have any other idea of what could be the issue here.

I can reproduce the same situation. And I can confirm that this is an expected behavior.

When a pipeline is queued the ref is set. All Stages/jobs in the pipeline will checkout the same reference. This is how Pipeline works.

We can get the ref info in the Pipeline summary Page:

is it possible to change this behavior?

I am afraid that there is no out-of-box method can directly change this behavior.

For a workaround, you can add git pull or git fetch command in stage to sync the changes in remote azure repo.

For example: git pull origin HEAD:main

- stage: stagename
  jobs:
  - job: 
    steps:
    - checkout: self
      persistCredentials: true
    - powershell: |
  
       git pull origin HEAD:main
       git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
       git config --global user.name "Your Name"
       xxxx
       git add .
       git commit -m "123"
       git push  origin HEAD:main