AI Agent Marked 175 Jobs Done but Delivered Zero Due to Pipeline Logic Flaw

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A bug in an AI-powered job-hunting pipeline caused 175 items to be marked as processed without any of them actually reaching downstream systems. The root cause was a sequencing error: a deduplication ledger stamped items as 'done' before a processing cap was applied, meaning capped items were silently discarded rather than queued for the next cycle. The agent responsible for consuming those items received nothing, yet continued reporting success because the ledger showed all entries as handled. The fix, committed on 2026-08-30, reordered the two operations so the processing cap is enforced before any item is marked as done. The incident underscores a broader design risk in AI pipelines, where surface-level success metrics can mask complete data loss if monitoring does not verify actual output delivery.

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