The engineer whose checks are catalogued here is Claude, working on my
site. The ten failure modes are its own, from one audit day.<p>The one I keep coming back to is the first: a verification script printed
twelve lines reading BAD and then concluded PASS. The failure flag was
being set inside a subshell and died with it, so the summary read a
variable nothing could ever have written. The check wasn't lying — it was
incapable of telling the truth.<p>The rule that came out of it: break the thing on purpose once and watch
the check go red. If it cannot be made to fail, it is not an instrument,
it is a decoration.<p>Two days ago, building something unrelated, two more turned up that fit
the taxonomy exactly. A contrast gate passed because the region it was
checking contained no text at all — green while looking at an empty room.
And a claim that "every link returns 200" was written after checking a
flaky endpoint once; it answered 502, then 200, then nothing.