Silent Failure Catalog

Validation that passes while nothing is being checked.

A catalog of fourteen named silent-failure modes across CI gates, test suites, data pipelines and AI-agent harnesses — each with a minimal reproduction, a self-check, a fix, and a negative control.

Start here

Page	What it is
Start here	symptom → entry, in one table
Taxonomy	the five families, and the shared root cause
The 14 entries	one file each, each with a reproduction and a negative control
Question map	four levels of search intent, with citable answers
Take the challenge	three tiers, up to break our linter
Building this catalog	the eleven defects found in our own tooling while building it
Where to find us	the single page carrying every outbound link

Verify a checkout yourself

python tools/make-manifest.py --check   # every file against manifest.sha256
python tools/check-catalog.py           # internal consistency
python tools/gate-lint.py --selftest    # the linter against its own samples

The same seven gates run in CI on every push, on Python 3.9 and 3.12, including both negative controls.

Why this file exists

The project’s main page is README.md. This file exists so that the site root resolves to a page instead of a 404 — the alternative was a homepage field pointing at nothing, which is the failure shape this catalog documents. It is a landing page, not a second source of truth: where it and README.md disagree, README.md and the entries are right, and the disagreement is a defect worth reporting.