Scheduled Jobs Can Appear Healthy While Critical Work Goes Overdue

A local AI news pipeline on a Mac was logging successful job statuses even as its actual news generation fell behind schedule, exposing a flaw in how job health was being measured. The system's dashboard confirmed the jobs existed and showed no consecutive failures, but failed to flag that the expected output had not been produced within the required interval. Investigation revealed that an overdue news job could lose a shared execution lock to lower-priority tasks — such as weekly model checks — and immediately return a 'busy' result without doing any work. Developers revised the control flow to check whether a task is due before attempting to acquire the lock, reducing unnecessary lock contention. The fix also improved status reporting by separately tracking job registration, scheduler activity, and actual work completion, so overdue tasks are surfaced rather than hidden behind a clean failure count.