Green CI Checkmarks Can Hide Silent Test Failures, Developer Warns

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A developer discovered that GitHub Actions' 'continue-on-error: true' setting can mask critical test failures by recording a step's conclusion as 'success' even when it crashes. While testing a cross-platform project, a UnicodeEncodeError on Windows caused Python to crash mid-summary, silently wiping all 58 test results before they could be logged. The GitHub Actions API showed no failure, burying the actual crash status in a rarely checked 'outcome' field rather than the standard 'conclusion' field. To address this, the developer built a verification script called 'hukum_kapisi.py' that runs after tests without permissive error settings and confirms that result logs were fully written — not that tests passed. The broader warning applies to any CI pipeline relying on screen output or summary loops: a green checkmark may only mean the reporting script didn't visibly fail, not that test data was ever captured.

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