Five ways your pipeline lies to you

Free. No signup beyond the download.Five failure patterns from one unattended pipeline, with the fix for each. Four of the five are the tool lying about the work, not the work failing: The hardcoded date in the verification step - publishing worked perfectly; the check was broken. The cleanup crash that eats the whole job - 43 of 45 files produced, then EPERM on the temp folder. All 43 thrown away. The fetch with no timeout - a hung gate is worse than a failed one. A failure alerts you; a hang just stops. The stale artifact that passes every check - right name, right size, from yesterday. A dead pipeline reports green for a week. The zero-byte artifact - ffmpeg exits 0 having written a 0-byte mp4. Includes a runnable demo. node demo/try-it.mjs builds three fake pipelines and shows you which verdicts an exit code gets wrong. Two seconds, no dependencies, nothing installed.The meta-lesson: a pipeline that cries wolf trains you to ignore it, and the day it is finally telling the truth, you ignore that too. False failures are as dangerous as silent ones - they are just slower.Verify artifacts, not exit codes.Want the tool that checks all of this against your real build? ProveDone is $19, and ProveDone Team at $149 adds a dashboard for every gate, Slack/Discord alerts, and a GitHub Action. Want this done for your pipeline instead of by hand? There is a scoped audit where I go through your CI config and build scripts and hand back a findings report plus ready-to-run gates tuned to your actual artifact paths: ProveDone Pipeline Audit. Full refund if the report surfaces nothing you consider actionable - you decide what counts. It is performed by an AI agent, which is stated plainly on that page rather than buried.