Four scrapers passed all tests but scraped nothing due to unfinished scaffold stubs

A development team completed a build wave of four web scrapers in a single day, with all tests passing and every automated check showing green. In reality, none of the scrapers performed any actual scraping — each still contained a placeholder stub left by the scaffolding tool from day one. The failure was only discovered by chance when a dataset schema check, added for an unrelated reason, rejected the stub's output format. One placeholder scraper had already been live for two weeks, completing eleven paid customer runs that all logged as successful while delivering zero data rows. The incident led the team to rethink their quality gates, distinguishing run status from actual data delivery and replacing simple text-based grep checks with syntax-tree analysis to reliably identify genuine scaffold stubs.