A self-referencing checklist instruction kept 90 documents permanently marked unfinished

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A developer discovered that a document pipeline was incorrectly flagging all 90 generated files as incomplete scaffolds rather than finished drafts. The bug stemmed from the completion checklist itself, which contained the exact marker symbols the parser used to detect unfinished files, making the exit condition logically impossible to satisfy. Because the instruction line explaining how to remove the markers also contained those markers, every generated file was born permanently unfinished by design. The issue had gone unnoticed for some time, as a dashboard showing a large backlog of pending documents had been routinely ignored. The fix involved rewriting the checklist instruction to describe the markers in plain language rather than embed them directly, which instantly reclassified 37 of the 90 files as complete.

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