A missing npm ci silently starved the content-mining pipeline for a week

Ahnii!

Earlier posts covered building and refining the automated content pipeline: a scheduled job scans recent commits, groups them by theme, and files GitHub issues as raw material for future posts. Every mined candidate gets validated against a JSON schema before the workflow files an issue for it — that's the guardrail that keeps malformed seeds out of the queue. For about a week, that guardrail silently dropped every candidate instead of filing a single one.

What Broke

The mining script, scripts/mine-git-activity.sh, builds a seed for each commit group and validates it with schemas/validate.js, which loads the ajv JSON Schema validator:

const Ajv = require('ajv');
const addFormats = require('ajv-formats');

ajv and ajv-formats are devDependencies in package.json, so they only exist after npm ci runs. The content-mine.yml workflow checked out the blog repo and ran the mining script directly — it never installed Node dependencies first. Every call to the validator hit Cannot find module 'ajv' and exited non-zero.

The script treated that crash the same as a real validation failure: reject the candidate, move on. No error surfaced anywhere. The workflow itself finished green, because the script's own exit code was still 0 — it just never filed anything. Net result: zero issues created, for about a week, and nothing in the logs said so unless you went looking.

Fix 1: Fail Open, Warn Loud

The first patch, in the blog repo, doesn't wait for CI to be fixed — it makes the script defend itself. Before validating anything, it checks whether the validator's dependencies actually resolve:

VALIDATOR_OK=1
if ! node -e "require('ajv'); require('ajv-formats')" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  echo "WARN: schema-validator deps (ajv) not installed — creating issues WITHOUT seed validation. Add 'npm ci' to the mining workflow to restore validation." >&2
  VALIDATOR_OK=0
fi

Downstream, the validation gate becomes an or: skip validation and file the issue anyway if the deps aren't there, instead of letting the crash masquerade as "this candidate is invalid":

if [[ "$VALIDATOR_OK" == "0" ]] || $VALIDATOR mined-seed "$SEED_FILE" > /dev/null 2>&1; then
  # ...build and create the issue...

That's a deliberate trade: an unvalidated issue is a minor cleanup problem for a human curator. A silently starved queue is a week of lost content ideas nobody knew to chase. Given the choice, fail open and be loud about it.

Fix 2: Actually Install the Dependency

The warning fixes the symptom. The root cause was still the missing install step, patched separately in the content-mine.yml workflow (in jonesrussell/jonesrussell, the repo that owns the queue):

- name: Setup Node.js
  uses: actions/setup-node@v4
  with:
    node-version: 'lts/*'
    cache: 'npm'

- name: Install dependencies (ajv for seed validation)
  run: npm ci

With that in place, validation runs for real again — the fail-open guard in fix 1 becomes a safety net for the next unrelated dependency gap, not a permanent workaround for this one.

What Changed, at a Glance

The Lesson

A script that "succeeds" by doing nothing is worse than one that fails loudly, because nothing pages you for it. The mining workflow's exit code was never wrong; it was just measuring the wrong thing. The mining job runs daily, so this wasn't one bad run — it was seven straight silent failures before the empty queue was noticeable on its own. Exit code isn't the metric that would have caught it. Throughput is: issues filed per run, checked against zero. That's the check I was missing.

Baamaapii