Developer finds week-old unread log file held the fix to a flipping CI test verdict

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A software developer building an AI agent harness discovered a two-layered bug in their CI test pipeline that caused unreliable, verdict-flipping results for over a week. The first issue was a known Node.js runtime crash on Windows during process teardown, which the team had deliberately accepted and classified as a distinct non-blocking state called CRASH. The hidden second bug arose because the final test output and the process abort were in a race condition, meaning the CI classifier randomly received either a passing count or nothing at all, producing inconsistent block or pass verdicts on identical code. While investigating the classifier logic, the developer found a JSON result file written to disk a week earlier during the original investigation, containing a note explicitly stating the exit code could not be trusted and that the file should be used instead. The fix had effectively been sitting unread on disk the entire time, highlighting how a correctly handled first bug can obscure a separate, subtler failure hiding behind the same symptom.

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