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AI-inserted em dash in PowerShell script silently killed automation stack for five days

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A Windows automation stack running Claude Code CLI sessions went completely offline from August 26 to August 30, 2026, due to a single Unicode character in a shared PowerShell script. During a routine self-edit, an AI session added an idempotency guard to the central launcher file, including a comment that used a typographic em dash instead of a plain hyphen. Because the file was saved without a UTF-8 byte-order mark, PowerShell misread the encoding and failed to parse the script, silently crashing every scheduled task that depended on it before any log file could be created. No errors were recorded anywhere, making the outage invisible until four days of missing activity finally formed a recognizable pattern. The fix, deployed on August 31, involved correcting the file encoding, and forensic timestamps confirmed the exact AI session and character responsible for the failure.

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