A reader commented on my Claude Code vs Cursor post: "Have you hit the silent-degradation problem yet, where the pipeline keeps exiting green but the quality gate is quietly passing worse and worse output?"
The honest answer: yes, five times, with detection lags between 36 and 113 days.
I'm now betting that output-level inspection — checking what a pipeline actually produces — catches more meaningful failures than process-level monitoring for content pipelines like mine. This is the falsifiable version of that bet.
Five failures that hid behind green workflows
These are measured from docs/pdca-baseline.md, detection latency counted from the commit that introduced the fault to the commit that found it:
