Don't Merge the First Green Check: Hooks, Fixtures, and a Flake Budget

<p>A patch touches zero test files. No assertion changes, no new skips, no fixture edits. The suite goes green on the first run.</p> <p>Then someone opens the job duration graph

<p>A teammate deleted a test file on a Friday. Not on purpose. The suite still passed. The pipeline still went green. Nobody noticed for three weeks.</p> <p>Here's the part that

<p>An agent-written patch that lives only inside one long chat session is not a reviewable change for merge. Hidden constraints from that conversation never reach the repository,

<p>All your checks are green. Before you merge, one question worth asking: <strong>is it green because the code was fixed, or because the checker was silenced?</strong></p>

<p>Four agents entered an infinite loop in November 2025. They ran for 11 days. The bill was $47,000. Nobody noticed until it was over.</p> <p>The team was running a market

<p>An inference server stopped generating tokens while more than 200 GiB of host memory remained available. Its health endpoint kept returning HTTP 200. The first visible

<p><em>This article was originally published on <a href="https://etherealogic.ai/exit-code-2-how-claude-hooks-turn-agentic-rules-into-runtime-barriers/" rel="noopener