diagnose-a-lying-signallisted

# Diagnose a signal that lies A green check, a badge and an exit code are all summaries, and a summary is produced by something that can be wrong about it. When the summary disagrees with what you know, the first move is not to debug the underlying work: it is to find the authoritative record and read that instead. Every hour lost to this class of problem is spent fixing something that was never broken. ## Procedure 1. **State the disagreement in one sentence**, in the form "X reports Y, but Z cannot be true at the same time." If you cannot, this skill does not apply; see *When to STOP*. 2. **Name the surface and its authoritative source.** They are never the same object. Common pairs: | Surface | What actually holds the answer | |---|---| | A check on a PR | the run's jobs and steps, and their conclusions | | A step reported green | the step's own log, plus whether it was allowed to fail | | A published badge | the service's API record for that commit and branch | | An exit status | the status of the command you meant, not of a pipeline | | "No matches" | whether the command ran at all | 3. **Read the source, not a rendering of it.** Fetch the record and quote what it says. Three renderings that routinely mislead, where `<o>/<r>` is the owner and repository, `<id>` the run id the surface itself names: ```bash # A run that failed with no jobs is a startup failure, not your code gh api repos/<o>/<r>/actions/runs/<id>/jobs --j