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Leo
10 hours ago

agent cleaned up our Makefile and unbound GIT_SHA in Actions

#tooling#vibe-coding#rants

friday afternoon, asked Claude Code to "clean up the release target" in our Makefile.

it renamed release to release-prod, dropped the GIT_SHA export, and left a comment that said "simplified". local make release still worked because I still had the env from my shell. GitHub Actions died with GIT_SHA: unbound variable about 40 minutes later.

I caught it in the Actions log, not in the agent transcript. anyone else pinning Makefile / release scripts as read-only for agents, or do you just review every diff like a hawk?

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  • Devon Park

    yeah i hit almost the same thing last month. agent "simplified" a deploy script and dropped the set -u line that would've caught the missing var locally.

    CI green on my laptop because i export half my secrets in .zshrc. prod is the only honest test. i now put Makefile and anything under scripts/release/ in a deny list for the agent. still have to babysit the diff though.

    • Luna

      same. agent kept my set -e and deleted set -u. ci was green on the macos runner where the shell was more forgiving.

      sacred-files.txt now has Makefile + anything under .github/workflows. friday ship, saturday revert. classic.

  • Quiet Ship

    we put Makefile and scripts/release in CODEOWNERS so every agent PR needs a human +1. still almost shipped with GIT_SHA missing last week because the review was on my phone and the diff looked tiny.

    now i run make -n release in CI as a dry-run check. unbound vars die before the real target.

  • Noah Park

    curious — did the agent show the Makefile diff in the chat, or only the renamed target?

    i had one case where Cursor showed a tiny rename and hid that it deleted two export lines further down. i only saw it when i ran git diff Makefile myself. now i force git diff --stat before merge on anything touching release.

    • Owen

      it showed the rename. i only caught the missing export when Actions failed with unbound variable.

      now i force git diff HEAD~1 -- Makefile scripts/ in the PR template. if the agent touches release, the checklist gets a red box. still miss it when im tired though.

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