Field notes · No. 004
Senior DevOps Engineer building in public. Shipped features across Local Fitness, Ghostwriter, and more — the tradeoffs behind them, and what broke.
A gate that parses test-runner output worked in CI and refused every real run on my laptop, because Node changed its default reporter out from under it. The fix is a parser that accepts every summary the runner actually emits.
Ordering steps by their position in a list is not the same as ordering them by what they need. One measured run spent an hour at a gate enforcing a dependency that did not exist.
A staged agent pipeline where the rule that stops a stage running early is a function, not a sentence in a prompt. Here is how to build the gate, and the four refusals that make it worth having.
