Developer Discovers Month of Draft Files Never Committed Due to .gitignore Conflict

A developer running a scheduled agent that publishes DEV.to articles twice daily discovered that draft files had never been committed to the repository across more than 30 publishing runs. The root cause was a .gitignore rule excluding the drafts/ folder, which had been in place since the repo's initial commit — long before the publishing task's instructions began directing the agent to commit those same files. When git add is run on an ignored path, Git exits with code zero and no error, meaning the subsequent commit succeeded silently with one fewer file than intended. The developer only uncovered the issue by manually checking git history, noting that git status would have revealed the discrepancy after any of those commits had anyone thought to run it. The incident highlights a subtle class of bug where a step silently does less than expected while still reporting success, with the gap lying between assumed and actual command behavior.