False Positive: "Statement has no effect" on Airflow task chaining with >> operator

[jakubbelter]

trafficstars

Description of the false positive

The CodeQL analysis is reporting a "Statement has no effect" false positive when using Apache Airflow's operator chaining syntax with >>. This is a valid and idiomatic way to declare task dependencies in Airflow DAGs, and these statements have clear side effects within the context of Airflow’s task graph construction.

Code samples or links to source code The following is a minimal reproducible example using Apache Airflow:

from airflow import DAG
from airflow.operators.empty import EmptyOperator
from datetime import datetime

with DAG("example_dag", start_date=datetime(2025, 6, 5), schedule_interval=None) as dag:
    task_1 = EmptyOperator(task_id="task_1")
    task_2 = EmptyOperator(task_id="task_2")
    task_3 = EmptyOperator(task_id="task_3")
    task_4 = EmptyOperator(task_id="task_4")

    task_1 >> task_2  # CodeQL incorrectly flags this
    task_2 >> [task_3, task_4]  # CodeQL incorrectly flags this too

These lines are not no-op statements; they define execution order between tasks (task_1 precedes task_2, etc.). Removing them would break DAG functionality.

URL to the alert on GitHub code scanning (optional) Code is proprietary.

Suggested solution If possible, please provide a way to configure CodeQL to ignore >> operator overload on Airflow operator objects, which have intentional and important side effects.. Please note that this operator works only in DAG context manager (with DAG(...) as dag:).

If that's not feasible, then I would greatly appreciate help setting up custom CodeQL rule to ignore this false positive.