testing

A lock checked once at startup guards the door, not the data. Fencing tokens validated at every state write, plus a heartbeat lease, are what guard the data.

TL;DR: A force-killed transcribe process showed why one-time lock checks fail: after the lock expired, a second session took over and idempotent resume reused finished windows from sidecars. The fix is fencing tokens, checked at every state write, so stale sessions die with lock-stolen-mid-run. Minimum package: TTL lock, heartbeat, and a negative control proving the guard fails.

One missing badge image broke typecheck. A story about type erasure, optional properties, and parametrized contract tests guarding per-locale JSON content.

Auditing my blog article pipeline: a chopped mermaid token, paragraphs that shattered despite clean verify, and three gate gaps found only by a human question.