Developer finds idempotency guard fails open on the exact error it was built to catch

A developer discovered two bugs in a duplicate-publish guard added to their DEV.to publishing script just days after it was written. The first flaw was a missing pagination parameter, limiting duplicate checks to only the 30 most recent articles on an account with over 100 posts. The more critical issue was in the exception handler: when the verification GET request hit a URLError — the exact network failure the guard was built to handle — the function returned None, telling the caller to proceed with publishing anyway. This caused the guard to fail open precisely when a retry was most likely to create a duplicate live article. The incident also revealed that an internal bug log had incorrectly documented the function as already handling pagination, underscoring how documentation can become unreliable without regular cross-checking against actual code.