48-Hour Frozen Remote Job Traced to stdin Prompt Waiting for Human Input

A developer spent 48 hours troubleshooting a seemingly frozen remote job, only to discover the process was silently blocked on an unanswered stdin prompt. A CLI tool generated to confirm before deleting build artifacts worked fine locally because a shell alias was automatically piping 'yes' into the script, masking the real issue. On the remote server, no such input was available, causing Python's input() function to wait indefinitely until the job timed out and was killed. Debugging steps like inspecting process state and file descriptors initially pointed nowhere, as the process showed no CPU usage and new log lines only appeared after the job was forcibly terminated. The fix involved replacing interactive confirmation prompts with an explicit --yes flag and adding a startup check that refuses to run if stdin appears to be an unattended pipe.