A cron that exits zero and produces nothing is not healthy. It is a silent failure wearing a green badge.
That distinction drove most of 2026-07-14 on Intent-OS. Phase-2 landed a stack of fail-closed controls, and the load-bearing one for operations was automation execution assurance: a registry, an engine, and active drills that refuse to treat "process finished cleanly" as "the work got done."
The lie exit codes tell
Schedulers are good at answering a narrow question: did the process start and did it return 0?
They are bad at the question operators actually care about:
