Two failures broke an unattended pipeline I ran for a few months, and neither of them looked like an error. I want to describe them precisely, because I spent a long time debugging the wrong thing both times.

Failure one: exit 0, nothing on disk

A publisher posted a blog entry successfully. It then verified the post by rebuilding the URL from parts — including a hardcoded month:

const check = `${base}/2026/08/${slug}.html`; // August, forever

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