Parser Read 0 of 887 Live Lines; System Correctly Flagged Result as UNKNOWN
A rewritten decision-log parser shipped by a development team successfully passed its test suite but parsed zero of 887 lines when run against actual production data. The failure occurred because test fixtures used hand-crafted, grammar-perfect examples that did not reflect the real formatting drift accumulated in the live ledger. Rather than reporting a vacuous PASS or a misleading FAIL, the monitoring gate returned a third status — UNKNOWN, tagged CHAIN_NOT_RECOMPUTABLE — signaling that the instrument could not produce a reliable result. The team argues this distinction is critical: collapsing 'unable to check' into either PASS or FAIL destroys the signal value of automated gates and can lead teams to ignore alerts or trust false greens. A separate finding from the same system showed a 31x performance gap between two read strategies, traced not to architectural layering but to one path reading full record bodies before filtering relevance.
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