Watch dependencies — this repo had nothing watching them - #3
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Deploy automation was deferred so a human could watch the first-ever deploy of new infrastructure, including this family's first Postgres instance. That rationale expired once the service went live, and leaving it deferred turned out worse than what it avoided: fly.toml only took effect if someone remembered to run `fly deploy` by hand. That failed silently on 2026-09-09. A scale-to-zero change merged with CI fully green and never reached Fly — the app kept running always-on, and the config looked applied because the commit was on master. It was only caught by checking the machine state directly. Config that silently doesn't apply is more dangerous than no config, because it reads as done. Deploy runs on push to master only, after the tests pass. --ha=false because Fly provisions TWO machines by default. It did exactly that on this service's manual deploy and the extra machine had to be scaled away by hand. No --strategy override: this app has no volume, so the default rolling strategy is fine. The sibling License service needs `immediate` because it mounts one. Needed a repo secret that did not exist — this repo had NO secrets at all, so a deploy job would have failed on its first run. FLY_API_TOKEN is now set, scoped to sentinel-sync only. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
No Dependabot config existed here. That is the same gap that produced the Sentinel AI agent's three production breakages in two days: mcp 2.x renaming a symbol, Starlette removing on_startup, and a ceiling added to stop the second one silently pinning the service to a Starlette line carrying 7 advisories. All three surfaced on a rebuild of a repo nobody had rebuilt since June. `pip-audit --strict` in CI catches a known advisory against what is already pinned. It does nothing about a lockfile quietly ageing out of support, which is the failure that actually happened. No auto-merge workflow, deliberately. This repo now deploys to Fly on push to master, and GitHub does not trigger `on: push` workflows for commits pushed with GITHUB_TOKEN — so an auto-merge would land a bump on master WITHOUT deploying it, and nothing would report an error. That is an observed bug in Sentinel-Command, where four frontend bumps merged and never shipped. A human merge triggers the deploy normally. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Dependabot config only — no code, no CI changes.
This repo had nothing watching its dependencies. That's the same gap that produced the Sentinel AI agent's three production breakages in two days (mcp 2.x renaming a symbol, Starlette removing
on_startup, and a ceiling added to stop the second one silently pinning the service to a Starlette line with 7 advisories) — all three surfaced on a rebuild of a repo nobody had rebuilt since June.The audit step in CI catches a known advisory against what's already pinned. It does nothing about a lockfile quietly ageing out of support, which is the failure that actually happened.
No auto-merge workflow, deliberately. This repo now deploys to Fly on push to master, and GitHub doesn't trigger
on: pushworkflows forGITHUB_TOKENmerges — so an auto-merge would land a bump on master without deploying it, with nothing reporting an error. That's an observed bug in Sentinel-Command, where four frontend bumps merged and never shipped. A human merge triggers the deploy normally.Verified each declared
directoryactually contains a manifest — a wrong path makes Dependabot silently do nothing, which is the same class of failure this is meant to close.🤖 Generated with Claude Code