Developer's CI check stayed red for 255 commits before anyone investigated

A continuous integration job in the agentwatch v0.2.1 release failed on every push to a release branch, starting from its very first run. The failure occurred because the script's required input file, a detector evaluation corpus, was excluded from version control by a broad gitignore rule meant for local scratch data. Since the check had never been green, the developer had treated the failure as normal and merged code despite it, across 255 commits. A second workflow, security.yml, was also failing for an unrelated configuration reason, which meant two meaningless red checks were ignored on every push. The author argues that a check with no prior passing state has no authority, so real regressions in these pipelines could have gone unnoticed. The article concludes with a release-readiness review that required an explanation for every red check on the branch.