CI gate passed without checking anything until ripgrep was installed on the runner

A developer found that a red badge on their repository was hiding a deeper problem: a fixture test needed ripgrep, which GitHub's Ubuntu runner lacks, so it failed only in CI. Because GitHub Actions stops a job at its first failed step, later checks had been silently skipped for weeks. A documentation gate that verifies search commands also skipped itself with a passing exit code whenever ripgrep was missing, and once it ran, it exposed three commands that broke on the ripgrep 14 version Ubuntu installs. Another check then found a step-count mismatch in the contributing guide, which the author corrected. A final fix addressed a script that ran commands in a supposedly empty temp directory but left variables unset, so searches expanded to the whole filesystem and passed or failed depending on file traversal order. The author concludes that skipped checks should not appear as passing in CI, and that running all steps locally at once surfaces every failure faster than repeated pushes.