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Dev admits GitHub Action passed CI only when its verifier was missing

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A software project built around a strict fail-closed security principle was found to have a critical flaw in its own GitHub Action: the CI step passed when the verification binary was absent and failed when it was present. The bug was discovered during an internal issue tracker review on August 31, 2026, and stems from a stub check that printed a false 'passed' message and exited with code zero instead of raising an error. A second flaw compounded the issue — the installed binary path invoked a non-existent subcommand, meaning a real verifier would also cause failure. The author published a confession before the fix was merged, deliberately leaving the defective file visible on the main branch to avoid any appearance of covering up the window. A patch has since been prepared that makes both branches exit truthfully, replacing the misleading stub output with a hard failure when the verifier is unavailable.

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