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Why a 'nothing changed' report can silently hide real problems in incremental tools

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A developer describes a rotation probe that checks which project memory files changed since the last run, and notes that the tool repeatedly reported 'nothing changed' while being wrong. The probe's bookmark used a naming scheme that didn't match the register, so ten of the projects were invisible to it while the output still looked like a normal run. A timestamp format mismatch caused the same silent failure, because zero newer files is indistinguishable from a healthy result. The author fixed the parsing so unreadable stamps raise an explicit error with exit code 2 instead of a clean empty list. The same comparison can also fail when a stamp lies ahead of the clock, leaving projects permanently reported as unchanged.

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