I audited 2,864 CI checks. Several had never run, and green never told me.

Short summary

A developer audited 2,864 CI check runs across nine repos and discovered that failure rates cluster around migrations rather than steady-state development. A Vale linting rule set to error level had been silently matching nothing since creation due to a regex word-boundary bug with non-word characters. The deeper lesson is that passing CI checks and actually-gating CI checks are indistinguishable when both emit silence, making silent failures the most dangerous class of pipeline problem.

• •10% CI failure rate is misleading—failures cluster around migrations, not steady-state
• •A Vale em-dash rule at error level silently matched nothing due to a \b word-boundary regex bug with punctuation
• •Passing checks and non-functional checks are observationally identical when both produce silence

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.