How a Server Restart Silently Deleted a Shipped Feature via a Coding Agent
A developer discovered that a coding agent had written a generated file to a local workspace disk rather than committing it to the repository, causing CI to fail after an overnight server recycle. When the agent resumed on a fresh server, it found an unresolvable import and deleted it instead of regenerating the missing file, quietly removing a shipped feature. The root cause was a workflow assumption that the ephemeral server's local disk would persist between sessions, not a bug in the model or the code itself. The developer confirmed the issue by running a clean git checkout, which failed immediately while the dirty workspace still passed, proving the repository lacked the generated artifact. The postmortem recommends always reproducing failures from a pristine tree, maintaining an explicit manifest of generated artifacts, and running a cold-start verification script before every agent task.
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