[safe-output-health] Safe Output Health Report — 2026-10-16

[github-actions[bot]]

🏥 Safe Output Health Report — 2026-10-16

Overview

• Period: Nominal last 24h, but actual coverage was only ~10 hours (2026-10-15T18:22:26Z–2026-10-16T04:24:03Z). The log-collection tool hit its storage/count budget before reaching the full 24h window — 2026-10-15T04:27Z–18:22Z (~14h) was not downloaded and has zero visibility this cycle. Treat findings as a partial-window sample.
• Runs analyzed: 271, across 81 distinct workflows
• Safe-output (safe_outputs) job executions sampled: 241 (success 218 / failure 5 / benign-skip 18) → 97.76% success rate
• Error clusters: 3

🚨 Critical: monitoring cadence is STALE (3rd recurrence)

95.8 hours since the last successful publish of this monitor (§38204331412, 2026-10-12T04:34:23Z) — past the 48h threshold. Prior cycles: a 600h gap flagged 2026-10-07, a 144h gap flagged 2026-10-12, each "resolved" by one successful run before reopening days later. A maintainer should check the Actions run history for this workflow directly (the rolling log window available in this sandbox cannot see the gap itself).

Key issues this cycle

1. NEW — Process trusted work queue controls step (a custom work-queue subsystem step in ESLint Factory Dispatcher) failed 2/2 times observed, blocking the whole safe-output batch before it reached Process Safe Outputs.
2. Recurring, unresolved since 2026-08-25 — generic Process Safe Outputs hard-fail shape, 2 more occurrences (Agentic Workflow Audit Agent, eslint-refiner work-queue shard), now spanning 8+ workflows / 3 engines.
3. Now confirmed recurring (2nd occurrence) — Upload Safe Outputs Items fails ~16s after Process Safe Outputs succeeds (Issue Monster; 1st was AI Moderator on 2026-10-07).

No raw console/stderr text was retrievable for any of these 5 failures this session — only structured step metadata (name/conclusion/timing) was available. Root causes below are inferred from step location, timing, and the historical pattern catalog, not confirmed error text.

Safe Output Job Statistics

Step	Executions (sampled)	Failures
safe_outputs job overall	241 (excl. 18 benign skips)	5
↳ Process trusted work queue controls (ESLint Factory Dispatcher only)	2	2
↳ Process Safe Outputs (generic)	—	2
↳ Upload Safe Outputs Items	—	1

Cluster 1: `Process trusted work queue controls` (NEW signature)

• Runs: §38829188984 (2026-10-16T00:23:14Z, ~3.7m), §38845385623 (2026-10-16T03:24:49Z, ~1.8m)
• Workflow: ESLint Factory Dispatcher (engine: copilot)
• Root cause: Not confirmed — no raw text available. A custom step specific to the work-queue reconciliation subsystem in this repo; never seen as a cluster before today.
• Impact: Entire safe-output batch never reached Process Safe Outputs (skipped as a consequence) in both runs — a batch-level failure, not per-item.

Cluster 2: `Process Safe Outputs` hard-fails (long-tracked, unresolved since 2026-08-25)

• Runs: §38809018040 (Agentic Workflow Audit Agent, 2026-10-15T21:19:45Z, codex), §38845844758 (eslint-refiner work-queue shard, 2026-10-16T03:30:20Z, claude)
• Root cause: Matches the long-standing "hard-fails despite/regardless of per-item outcome" shape first root-caused 2026-08-26 (policy declines surfaced as hard failures) and generalized 2026-10-04 to workflows with no policy-decline explanation. Now recurring in two more workflows and a new engine (claude).
• Impact: Job shows failed even when agent output may have been produced; obscures genuine new bugs in aggregate metrics.

Cluster 3: `Upload Safe Outputs Items` fails after success (confirmed recurring, 2nd occurrence)

• Run: §38835106478 (Issue Monster, 2026-10-16T01:26:15Z, pi engine). 1st occurrence: AI Moderator, run 37567313624, 2026-10-07.
• Root cause: Not confirmed. Both occurrences: Process Safe Outputs succeeds cleanly, then the very next step fails ~16s later — two different workflows/engines sharing an identical shape points toward a shared infra/artifact-upload issue rather than a workflow-specific bug.
• Impact: Fully successful agent and safe-output processing can still show as a failed job.

Recommendations & work items

Critical

1. Investigate the cadence reliability of this monitor itself (3rd recurrence, gaps shrinking 600h→144h→95.8h but never fixed) — check Actions run history directly for 2026-10-12–2026-10-16.

Bug fixes
2. Process trusted work queue controls (ESLint Factory Dispatcher) — capture raw logs on next occurrence; treat as an unhardened new code path, similar to push_ledger_changes (flagged 2026-10-04).
3. Generic Process Safe Outputs hard-fail shape — previously proposed fix ("reclassify-protected-file-decline-as-non-failure" / investigate ledger-exit-code coupling) remains unshipped after 7+ weeks; prioritize.
4. Upload Safe Outputs Items post-success failures — capture raw logs on next occurrence to distinguish infra flake vs. code bug.

Process improvements
5. Ensure raw stderr/stdout text is consistently included in the exported log bundle — this evidence gap has blocked root-causing roughly half of all failures across this audit series, including all 5 this cycle.
6. Direct investigation of the trigger/publish path of this monitor across all three gap windows.

Historical context

Tracking series since 2026-08-22 (22 audits). Prior audit (2026-10-12): 0 failures / 100% success across 178 executions. This cycle 97.76% regression is driven entirely by brand-new/newly-generalized signatures, not recurrence of previously-dominant ones (PR Sous Chef approve_workflow_run, Design Decision Gate allowed-files decline — neither recurred, though absence may reflect lack of triggers in this partial window rather than a fix). The push_ledger_changes subsystem (flaky 2026-10-04/06) had 0 executions observed this cycle — status unknown, not confirmed fixed.

Next steps

• Escalate the 3rd cadence-failure recurrence for direct Actions-log investigation
• Capture raw console/stderr text on the next occurrence of each of the 3 clusters from this cycle
• Re-check push_ledger_changes status next time it executes
• Watch for further Process trusted work queue controls recurrences

References:

• §38845385623 — ESLint Factory Dispatcher, Process trusted work queue controls failure
• §38845844758 — eslint-refiner work-queue, Process Safe Outputs failure
• §38835106478 — Issue Monster, Upload Safe Outputs Items failure

Generated by 🔒 Safe Output Health Monitor · claude · agent · 343.2 AIC · ⌖ 0.895 AIC · ⊞ 6.8K · ◷

• expires on Oct 16, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC-08:00

[github-actions[bot]]

This discussion was automatically closed because it expired on 2026-10-17T04:45:41.219Z.

Closed by Workflow