How a silent Postgres RLS bug caused an AI agent to miss a full job queue

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An autonomous AI system called ARIA, built by Elevare Digital, stopped processing jobs after a Postgres Row-Level Security policy was applied to its work queue table without a service-role bypass. Because RLS silently filters out unauthorised rows rather than raising an error, the orchestrator's queries returned an empty array with a 200 status, making the queue appear genuinely empty. The agent continued logging healthy idle heartbeats, so monitoring showed no signs of failure even as jobs piled up unprocessed. The root cause was that the RLS policy was scoped to authenticated user IDs, but the orchestrator connected under the service role without an explicit bypass clause. The recommended fix is to add a canary row-count check that confirms read access is actually working, and to ensure the service-role key or an explicit policy bypass is in place for backend orchestrators.

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