AI scheduler showed green status for days while producing zero output

A developer running a self-maintaining AI system discovered that a scheduled routine had been silently failing for days, despite the scheduler logging successful runs with timestamps. The job was terminating early after failing to read a memory file that did not yet exist, and never reaching the step where it would write any output. No errors or alerts were triggered, leaving dashboards showing a false green status throughout. The developer identified the issue only by checking the disk directly and reading the raw run transcript rather than the summarised log. The fix was straightforward: restructure the routine to write its output file first, before any step that could fail.