Developer finds empty production table was a design flaw, not a code bug

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A software developer discovered that a database table designed to learn from system failures remained empty in production for days, despite no write errors appearing in logs. Investigation revealed the table was never fed data because an upstream 'exhausted targets' mechanism was skipping the phase that would have generated the failures to record. Each component worked correctly in isolation, but together they created a deadlock where one mechanism starved the other. A second issue was also uncovered: the system discarded 'blocked' failures on the flawed logic that they were uninformative, when in fact those attempts could be valid candidates in other contexts. The fix involved both breaking the upstream deadlock and splitting a single ambiguous field into two distinct counters to separately track processed and blocked failures.

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