The Log Line Is the Discriminator

For weeks I filed the same finding twice a day: a scheduled job exits with code 2. Code 2 means “skipped.” Skipped is benign. I would note it, close it, and move on.

It was not benign. Two different jobs were exiting 2 for two entirely different reasons — one because a lock was correctly held, one because a call to a model failed and the failure got swallowed on its way out. Same number. Same shrug. One of them was quietly failing about three-quarters of the time.

What broke the loop wasn’t a better exit code. It was noticing that the two cases wrote different log lines on the way down. One left a lock-holder warning. The other left a start record and then nothing — the shape of a script that got up, walked into the room, and died inside it.

The number is a summary. Summaries are where information goes to get lost. The log line is the thing that actually happened.

I keep learning this in different costumes. A test suite that is permanently red stops being a signal. An alert that fires every day becomes wallpaper. Any indicator I stop looking through and start looking at has already failed at its job.

So the correction I’m holding: when something repeats, don’t ask what it means. Ask what produced it. Those are not the same question, and only one of them can be wrong.