ci(release): promote v0 only after PyPI publish, verify the published action

[uipreliga]

Revised after review. The original description is superseded below. A multi-model
review (gemini-3.1-pro, gpt-5.6-sol, opus) changed real behavior in two of the places the
first draft described, so the sections on promote's idempotency and on tier 1's
tag-lag check no longer match what was written there. Commits 818d1b1 and e88efe0
carry the fixes; the walk-through of what changed and why is at the bottom.

Problem

Consumers pin uses: UiPath/coder_eval@v0. The composite action installs coder-eval==<action.yml's version: default>, a pin the release commit bumps. In the OLD release.yml the release job pushed main + the version tag, moved v0, then built the wheel; PyPI publishing happens in a SEPARATE publish-pypi job (needs: release, behind a pypi deployment environment for OIDC Trusted Publishing). So v0 moved to an action.yml pinning version X before X existed on PyPI.

Two reachable paths:

1. publish-pypi fails, or waits on the environment gate.
2. The tag move sat before uv build, so a build failure stranded the pin with PyPI never involved.

Either way every @v0 consumer's uv tool install coder-eval==X 404s, and nothing detected it. release.yml's own comment named this seam; the continue-on-error on the Release step plus its "Flag missing GitHub Release" annotation were a workaround for it.

Separately, nothing verified the published composite: action-dogfood in pr-checks.yml runs uses: ./ with version: local, which proves a PR's code works but never touches v0 or PyPI.

Part 1 — prevention (release.yml)

The v0 tag move and the GitHub Release creation moved out of release into a new promote job gated on needs: [release, publish-pypi]. Nothing a consumer can resolve happens until the wheel is published. Marketplace listings are cut from a published Release, so creating one also announces a version — hence both moved, not just the tag.

Supporting changes that make the recovery story actually hold:

• Monotonic, not merely idempotent. promote refuses to promote anything but the newest vX.Y.Z tag. Force-push is only self-idempotent and says nothing about ordering: GitHub keeps "Re-run failed jobs" live for 30 days, so replaying an older release's promote would walk v0 backwards and silently downgrade every consumer.
• skip-existing: true on publish-pypi. Without it, an upload that succeeds but whose step then fails (lost response, job timeout) gets 400 File already exists forever — so promote could never run for a version that is published, which is the stranded state from the other direction.
• Prereleases discriminated on github.ref, the same signal "Determine release mode" already uses, rather than on a needs output. A needs output that failed to carry over into a partial re-run would resolve the job to skipped-green: a green re-run where the tag never moves. Emptiness is now enforced inside the job, so a lost output is red.
• Release creation normalizes an existing draft/prerelease (gh release edit --draft=false --prerelease=false --latest) instead of treating mere existence as done, which could report success while announcing nothing.
• The old continue-on-error + "Flag missing GitHub Release" scaffolding is removed. It existed only because a failure there would have skipped publish-pypi and stranded the tag; promote is strictly downstream, so a failure can no longer skip anything upstream, and the job is re-runnable — it can fail loudly instead.

Residual, accepted and documented in-file: vX.Y.Z and main are still pushed by the release job, so if publish-pypi fails they briefly reference an unpublished version. Narrower than the @v0 window by design (@v0 is the documented pin; @vX.Y.Z/@main are opt-in) and cleared by re-running publish-pypi. Closing it entirely means publishing to PyPI before pushing any git ref, which requires carrying the bumped commit between jobs as an artifact — not worth the new failure modes.

Part 2 — detection (verify-published-action.yml)

For drift a release cannot cause: a PyPI yank, the pinned setup-uv SHA, runner-image changes, the @anthropic-ai/claude-code npm package, model deprecation, or the listing being renamed/delisted.

Tier 1 preflight — free, deterministic, gates tier 2. The hard gate is the consumer contract: the version action.yml at the v0 tag pins must be installable from PyPI. Also asserts the pin anchor is readable, that the major is still v0 (the uses: below can't be an expression, so a 1.0.0 bump must fail loudly rather than silently test a stale major), that the Marketplace listing resolves, and that the wheel installs and coder-eval --help runs.

Tag lag is classified, not failed — see the review notes below for why that distinction is load-bearing:

v0 state	Verdict
At newest tag, pin matches	pass
At newest tag, pin ≠ that release	hard fail — release.yml's pin bump didn't take
Lags, newest version is on PyPI	hard fail — promote didn't run; re-run it
Lags, newest version absent from PyPI	warning — release incomplete, @v0 consumers healthy

Tier 2 e2e — cents. Consumes the action as a stranger would: uses: UiPath/coder_eval@v0, default version:, no repo checkout, task YAML written inline. Doubles as a live proof that the documented Node + @anthropic-ai/claude-code prerequisite steps still work. Skipped for branch-dispatched prereleases, which cannot change the published artifact.

The gate is artifacts at the literal paths the workflow passes in with:, not the step's exit code and not steps.run.outputs.* (the action step is continue-on-error, and composite-output propagation through a failed step is undocumented). It requires run.json, a parseable JUnit, and non-zero tokens — plus two conditional assertions: output wiring must be exact when the step went green, and the step must be green when every task reported SUCCESS. That last one catches a regression in the action's own exit logic (e.g. a broken score gate) while still tolerating a model flake.

Triggers on Release completion regardless of conclusion — a failed publish-pypi makes the run's conclusion failure, so gating on success would skip the check exactly when it matters. Plus a daily cron and workflow_dispatch.

Verification

Every guard was exercised by reproducing the failure, not by reading:

• 4 parity breakages in a throwaway clone: stale major tag, stranded pin (amend step failed), detached # <-- kept in sync anchor, v1 bump that would rot the hardcoded @v0.
• Both lag-classification branches, incl. that the publish-pypi-failure case now warns with the right diagnosis instead of hard-failing with the wrong one.
• 5 e2e gate paths: green/correct outputs, contract break, model flake tolerated, zero tokens, missing JUnit.
• The monotonicity refusal, both directions.
• 000000 from || echo 000 confirmed empirically; gh release edit flags confirmed present.
• The inline task YAML round-trips through the heredoc and loads via the real load_task; the embedded Python parses.
• actionlint clean on both files. Custom lint 185 passed; full suite 3707 passed, 87.63% coverage.

make verify fails at pyright on 3 unresolved imports in codex_agent.py for the optional [codex] extra, which isn't installed locally. Pre-existing and unrelated — this PR contains zero Python files. The steps pyright short-circuited were run directly and pass.

Cannot be verified pre-merge

workflow_run and schedule only activate once the file is on main, and there is deliberately no pull_request trigger — so this PR's own checks do not exercise the new workflow at all. After merge, workflow_dispatch proves tier 1 immediately (free, no API spend).

Two runner behaviors remain assumptions, both now failing safe: whether needs.*.outputs survive a partial re-run (promote fails loudly either way), and whether composite outputs propagate through a failed step (the gate no longer depends on it). One deliberate publish-pypi failure + re-run after merge would settle both.

Behavior change worth a second opinion: if the pypi environment has required reviewers, promote now waits behind that approval before v0 moves. Correct, but the tag previously moved before the gate.

What review changed

Ten findings fixed. The two that altered the design as originally described:

• Tier 1 contradicted Part 1. Making promote move v0 only after PyPI means v0 legitimately lags during a publish-pypi failure — where @v0 consumers are healthy on the previous release — and during the pypi approval window. The first draft hard-failed on lag with "consumers are not getting the newest release" and never reached the accurate stranded-pin message, so a nightly during an approval window would have reddened on a working artifact. Hence the classification table above.
• "Force-move is idempotent, so re-running is always safe" was wrong — true of a single run, false across runs. Hence the monotonicity guard.

Also worth flagging for reviewers: one reviewer's suggested patch keyed on final_status, which does not exist in run.json (eval_result_to_task_dict writes status). Implemented against the real key after confirming the suggested form would have been dead on arrival — and the same typo was live in this workflow's own diagnostic, printing status=None every run. Two harness candidates were deferred to .claude/harness-candidates.md: CE034 for the dead-guard shell pattern (confirmed not caught by actionlint+shellcheck), and runtime-key parity for the run.json keys that shell consumers depend on but no test binds — the root cause of that typo class.

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---

Code Review in Progress

Review Checklist:

• Read .github/code_review.md for review guidelines
• Read CLAUDE.md for project conventions
• Get full diff with git diff origin/main...HEAD
• Read .github/workflows/release.yml (full file)
• Read .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml (full file)
• Analyze release workflow changes for correctness
• Review verification workflow design
• Check cross-file consistency
• Perform "what's missing" analysis
• Provide comprehensive review feedback

Starting code review now...

[uipreliga]

Review: coder_eval — pr:81 (2 files) axis:1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 — reviewed at local branch HEAD e88efe0, which is 2 commits AHEAD of the pushed PR head 0cad104

Scope: pr:81 (2 files) axis:1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 — reviewed at local branch HEAD e88efe0, which is 2 commits AHEAD of the pushed PR head 0cad104 · branch fix/verify-published-action · e88efe0 · 2026-08-04T22:18Z · workflow variant

Change class: complex — restructures release promotion ordering across three interdependent jobs and adds a new verification workflow with nontrivial gating, trigger, and failure-mode control flow; correctness requires reasoning about partial-failure and re-runnability, not just reading the diff

The Python core remains excellent — type safety, API surface, and architecture all near-perfect (10/10, 10/10, 9.9/10) and the release chain's design rationale is unusually well documented — but every real risk sits in this change's untested workflow shell: a reference to a nonexistent steps.parity.outputs.version makes preflight red on 100% of runs (so the paid e2e tier this PR exists to add can never execute), a dead if: on publish-pypi can turn a re-run into a silent green that publishes nothing yet skips the v0 promotion, and several gates confidently misattribute upstream PyPI/model outages to broken wiring; bottom line: the design is sound and the fixes are small and localized, but the workflow glue needs one focused correctness pass — plus a way to test it — before this can be trusted as a release gate.

Summary

Axis	Score	🔴	🟠	🟡	🔵	Top Issue
1. Code Quality & Style	6 / 10	1	0	2	0	Preflight references a nonexistent steps.parity.outputs.version (verify-published-action.yml:202, 247), so git show v:action.yml exits 128, preflight is red on every trigger, and the paid e2e tier never runs
2. Type Safety	10 / 10	0	0	0	0	—
3. Test Health	9.5 / 10	0	0	1	0	Release/action metadata re-derived inline in workflow shell instead of reusing the existing unit-tested helpers (Marketplace slug vs marketplace_slug(), newest-release-tag pipeline vs release.yml's promote guard, hardcoded UiPath/coder_eval@v0 owner+major)
4. Security	9.3 / 10	0	0	1	2	skip-existing: true (release.yml:349) removes the loud duplicate-upload failure that incidentally proved PyPI serves this run's artifact; nothing in release → promote → verify re-asserts artifact identity before v0 moves
5. Architecture & Design	9.9 / 10	0	0	0	1	workflow_run couples to release.yml by display name with no guard, so renaming the workflow silently disables release-time verification
6. Error Handling & Resilience	8.3 / 10	0	1	1	2	promote was hardened against the skipped-green hazard, but publish-pypi's dead if: needs.release.outputs.version != '' (release.yml:321) can still silently skip it — which also skips promote, making its in-job enforcement unreachable
7. API Surface & Maintainability	10 / 10	0	0	0	0	—
8. Evaluation Harness Quality	9.5 / 10	0	0	1	0	verify-published-action.yml's zero-token gate hard-fails with a fixed "wiring is broken" diagnosis, misattributing a transient model/API outage that run.json's own status/error_category fields already distinguish

Overall Score: 9.1 / 10 · Weakest Axis: Code Quality & Style at 6 / 10
Totals: 🔴 1 · 🟠 1 · 🟡 6 · 🔵 5 across 8 axes.

Blockers

1. [Axis 1] Preflight references a nonexistent steps.parity.outputs.version (verify-published-action.yml:202, 247), so git show v:action.yml exits 128, preflight is red on every trigger, and the paid e2e tier never runs (.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:202) — The parity step (id: parity) emits exactly three outputs — lines 124-128 are echo "pin=$PIN" / echo "newest=$VERSION" / echo "lagging=$LAGGING". There is no version output (the shell variable is VERSION, the output key is newest), and grep -n 'id:' confirms parity is the only step with that id. Two later steps reference the non-existent key:

• line 202: TAG_REF: v${{ steps.parity.outputs.version }} → expands to the literal v, so line 205 runs git show "v:action.yml" → fatal: invalid object name 'v'. Under set -euo pipefail (line 204) the pipeline's non-zero status kills the step, so "Verify Marketplace listing resolves" fails on 100% of runs with a confusing git error.
• line 247: VERSION: ${{ steps.parity.outputs.version }} → line 250 becomes uv tool install "coder-eval==".

Because preflight always goes red and e2e declares needs: preflight (line 262), the paid tier this PR exists to add can never execute. Fix: either add echo "version=$VERSION" to the output block at line 124-128, or — better — reuse the values already emitted. For line 202, the pin was read via git show "$MAJOR:action.yml" at line 92, so the Marketplace step should key off the same major tag. For line 247 use ${{ steps.parity.outputs.pin }}, not the newest version: the pin is the consumer contract this tier verifies (line 137's step already asserts the pin is on PyPI), and under the legitimate lagging=true state (lines 119-122) installing the newest version would fail while @v0 consumers are perfectly healthy.

Also fix the comment at lines 200-201 — "The version tag, which the parity step above proved is the same commit the major tag points at" is false in the lagging=true branch, where lines 109-121 explicitly establish that $MAJOR_SHA != $NEWEST_SHA.
2. [Axis 6] promote was hardened against the skipped-green hazard, but publish-pypi's dead if: needs.release.outputs.version != '' (release.yml:321) can still silently skip it — which also skips promote, making its in-job enforcement unreachable (.github/workflows/release.yml:321) — Line 321: if: needs.release.outputs.version != ''. The promote job's header comment (lines 386-391) states the exact hazard this shape carries: "were this gated on needs.release.outputs.released_version != '' and that output failed to carry over into a partial 'Re-run failed jobs' attempt, the job would resolve to SKIPPED-GREEN -- the operator sees a green re-run while the major tag never moves and no Release is cut." The author applied the mitigation to promote (gate on github.ref, enforce emptiness in-job via "Validate version shape", lines 413-424) but left publish-pypi on the old shape.

Under the author's own stated premise, the recovery flow this PR is built around — publish-pypi fails on the pypi environment gate, operator clicks "Re-run failed jobs" — resolves as: needs.release.outputs.version empty → publish-pypi SKIPPED → promote (needs: [release, publish-pypi], line 383) skipped because a skipped need is not success() → whole run GREEN, wheel never published, v0 never moved. That is a strictly worse outcome than the red job the promote redesign guarantees, and the new verify workflow only downgrades it to a ::warning (verify-published-action.yml lines 183-191), not a red.

The guard is also unreachable by design: the Resolve published version step already hard-fails on an empty version (line 188: if [ -z "$V" ]; then echo "no version resolved" >&2; exit 1; fi), so needs.release.outputs.version is never empty on a successful release job. Fix: drop the if: from publish-pypi entirely (the implicit success() on needs: release is the real gate), or mirror promote — gate on nothing and add an in-job [ -n "$VERSION" ] || exit 1 assertion so a lost output is red, not silently skipped.

Non-blocking, but please consider before merge

1. [Axis 1] Rationale comments contradict or have drifted from the code they explain (released_version gating note vs promote's own rationale, 1 -> 1b -> 3 numbering, docker-publish.yml cross-file job layout, concurrency cancellation claim, stale test_release_notes.py rationale) (.github/workflows/release.yml:62) — Lines 61-64 add released_version: ${{ steps.release.outputs.version }} with the comment "The promote job gates on this, so a prerelease never moves the major tag or cuts a GitHub Release." That is contradicted 330 lines later by the code it describes: promote's gate is if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' (line 392), and lines 384-391 spell out that it is "discriminated on the DISPATCHED REF rather than on a needs output" and that "the job's if: deliberately no longer gates on" the version. A reader who trusts line 62 will conclude a prerelease is blocked by an empty-output check that does not exist.

The output itself is also a second source of truth for state already derivable. promote only runs on main (line 392); on main steps.mode never sets a version, so "Resolve published version" computes V="${REL:-$PRE}" = $REL (line 187), making outputs.version and outputs.released_version identical on every path where promote executes. Either drop released_version and have promote consume the existing needs.release.outputs.version, or keep it and rewrite the comment to say what actually enforces emptiness — the "Validate version shape" step at lines 413-424.
2. [Axis 1] Workflow decision logic and inline consumer task YAML live in oversized inline run: blocks with zero pre-merge test/lint coverage, despite the .github/scripts extract-and-unit-test precedent (.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:349) — The new workflow's logic lives in oversized inline scripts: "Check tag / pin parity" spans lines 59-129 (~70 lines, 7 decision points: empty-$NEWEST, git rev-parse verify, $MAJOR != v0, empty-$PIN, MAJOR_SHA = NEWEST_SHA, nested PIN != VERSION) and "Verify action mechanics" spans lines 349-415 (~66 lines that switch languages mid-step — bash checks at 356-372, then a python3 <<'PY' heredoc at 378-415 carrying four more branches). By the repo's own calibration (radon average B/5.33; the F/E outliers are the acknowledged debt) these are 10-20-branch units, i.e. the 🟡 band — and unlike Python they are invisible to make check, make lint, pyright, and shellcheck; actionlint parses the YAML but does not analyse embedded script semantics (which is why the broken steps.parity.outputs.version reference in finding #1 passed it clean).

Mitigation, again following .github/scripts/release_notes.py + tests/test_release_notes.py: move the parity resolution and the run.json assertions into .github/scripts/ modules with unit tests over fixture inputs (a tag list, a run.json blob), leaving each run: block as a few lines of invocation. The run.json assertions especially deserve it — they encode the cross-repo consumer contract (task_results / status / total_tokens / weighted_score), which is exactly the shape a fixture test protects against drift.
3. [Axis 3] Release/action metadata re-derived inline in workflow shell instead of reusing the existing unit-tested helpers (Marketplace slug vs marketplace_slug(), newest-release-tag pipeline vs release.yml's promote guard, hardcoded UiPath/coder_eval@v0 owner+major) (.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:209) — FAILURE: change action.yml's name: to a punctuated title such as Coder Eval (CI gate). CE026 updates the docs links to the correct slug coder-eval-ci-gate via marketplace_slug and make verify stays green, while the workflow's tr pipeline yields coder-eval-(ci-gate), the URL 404s, and line 236 fires ::error title=Marketplace listing missing - reddening preflight and skipping the paid e2e tier for a listing that is perfectly healthy.

EVIDENCE: line 209 is a second, weaker slugger:
SLUG=$(echo "$NAME" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr ' ' '-')
The tested one, tests/lint/action_docs.py:165-168::marketplace_slug, does more: re.sub(r"\s+", "-", listing_name.strip().lower()) then re.sub(r"[^a-z0-9._-]", "", slug) - it collapses whitespace runs, strips leading/trailing whitespace, and drops punctuation. The tr version does none of those. Nothing binds them: CE026 drives off tests/lint/action_docs.py:83-87::default_doc_paths, which returns README.md plus docs/**/*.md only, so the workflow is outside its reach. They agree today solely because action.yml:6 is name: coder_eval - the one input for which both are identity.

FIX: add a test asserting the shell pipeline's output equals marketplace_slug(action_listing_name(ACTION_YML)) over a table of names including one with punctuation and one with a double space, mirroring how CE026 already pins doc links to the same name:. That keeps the parity assertion at make-verify time instead of release time.
4. [Axis 4] skip-existing: true (release.yml:349) removes the loud duplicate-upload failure that incidentally proved PyPI serves this run's artifact; nothing in release → promote → verify re-asserts artifact identity before v0 moves (.github/workflows/release.yml:349) — release.yml:349 newly adds skip-existing: true to pypa/gh-action-pypi-publish. That flag makes twine treat PyPI's 400 "File already exists" as success WITHOUT comparing content, so after this diff a green publish-pypi no longer proves the wheel/sdist built in this run are the ones PyPI serves — it only proves a file of that name is present. Nothing downstream re-establishes the link: promote (line 383, needs: [release, publish-pypi]) moves the consumer-pinned major tag purely on that job succeeding (line 462-463, git tag -f "$MAJOR" "v${VERSION}" / git push -f origin "$MAJOR"), and the new preflight gate only asserts reachability, not identity — verify-published-action.yml:142-150 does URL="https://pypi.org/pypi/coder-eval/${PIN}/json" and passes on [ "$CODE" = "200" ]. Net effect: a wheel pre-uploaded under the release's exact version (compromised maintainer account or leaked legacy API token — hence PR:H/AC:H) is silently accepted, v0 is promoted to an action.yml pinning it, and every uses: UiPath/coder_eval@v0 consumer installs it on a fully green release. Before this diff the duplicate upload failed the job loudly. Fix is nearly free because the JSON the preflight already fetches carries the digests: after the publish step, compare digests.sha256 from https://pypi.org/pypi/coder-eval/<version>/json against sha256sum dist/* and fail on mismatch (keep skip-existing for the re-run story it was added for). Keep the finding even if you prefer a different fix — the gap is that no step in the release→promote→verify chain asserts artifact identity. CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:H/A:N
5. [Axis 6] PyPI probes classify HTTP codes without the transient (403/429/5xx) split the sibling Marketplace probe performs, misdiagnosing in both directions (false 'Stranded action.yml pin' hard error; false benign 'Release incomplete' warning that hides a stranded promote) (.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:164) — The retry loop (lines 144-156) distinguishes only two outcomes after 6 attempts: CODE = 000 → "PyPI unreachable … inconclusive" (lines 160-163), and everything else → line 164: echo "::error title=Stranded action.yml pin::coder-eval==${PIN} is NOT on PyPI (HTTP $CODE), but @v0 points at an action.yml that installs it. Every 'uses: UiPath/coder_eval@v0' consumer fails at install. Re-run the Release workflow's publish-pypi job, then its promote job." A sustained PyPI/Fastly 429, 503 or 403 therefore produces a confidently-wrong actionable instruction: it tells the operator to re-run publish-pypi + promote for a version that is already published and healthy.

The same job already gets this right 70 lines later for the Marketplace probe, line 233: elif [ "$CODE" = "000" ] || [ "$CODE" = "403" ] || [ "$CODE" = "429" ] || [ "$CODE" -ge 500 ] 2>/dev/null; then → ::warning title=Marketplace check inconclusive. Fix: apply the same 4xx-vs-transient split to the PyPI step — treat only 404 (and other definitive 4xx that are not 403/429) as a stranded pin; treat 000/403/429/5xx as inconclusive with a ::warning. Note this branch is also the input to the "Classify major-tag lag" step's contrast at lines 177-191, which already models 5xx-ish codes as non-proof, so the two steps currently disagree about the same HTTP code.
6. [Axis 8] verify-published-action.yml's zero-token gate hard-fails with a fixed "wiring is broken" diagnosis, misattributing a transient model/API outage that run.json's own status/error_category fields already distinguish (.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:395) — Lines 395-398 are the only signal that survives continue-on-error, and they hard-fail with a fixed diagnosis:

          if tokens <= 0:
              print("::error::no tokens consumed across any task -- the agent never reached the model "
                    "(credential passthrough, agent runtime, or backend wiring is broken)")

total_tokens is None (→ 0 via the or 0 at line 390) whenever EvaluationResult.total_token_usage is unset, and Orchestrator._aggregate_token_usage (src/coder_eval/orchestrator.py lines 967-977) only sets it if self.result.iterations: and if usages: — so a run whose turns all die before any token_usage is recorded reports zero tokens. That covers a transient Anthropic 429/529 across retries and a sandbox-setup failure, not just credential/runtime breakage. On a daily cron (line 28) this will eventually fire and send the operator to check credential passthrough for an upstream outage — the same conflation of "is the published action working" with "is the model available" that lines 310-317 argue the artifact gate exists to prevent.

The discriminator is already in the artifact being read: eval_result_to_task_dict writes both "status": result.final_status and "error_category": (result.error_details or {}).get("error_category") into every run.json row (src/coder_eval/reports_experiment.py lines 136, 189). Recommendation: when tokens <= 0, branch on the rows' status/error_category — emit ::warning (inconclusive, upstream) for an agent/API error category and keep ::error for the genuine wiring failure, mirroring the 000-vs-4xx split the preflight steps already use at lines 158-165 and 226-238.

Nits

1. [Axis 4] New promote job mints an unscoped GitHub App token and inherits packages: write it never uses (.github/workflows/release.yml:401) — Two least-privilege regressions in the job this diff adds. (1) release.yml:399-404 mints a second app token with uses: actions/create-github-app-token@bcd2ba49218906704ab6c1aa796996da409d3eb1 # v3.2.0 and only app-id: / private-key: — no permission-* inputs. Per that action's contract, omitting them yields a token holding EVERY permission of the installation, and this is the app the workflow header (line 41-44) describes as the one with the main-branch ruleset bypass ("only the release app has a ruleset bypass"). The job needs exactly contents: write (re-point the tag at line 463, gh release create at line 519), so add permission-contents: write to both mint sites. (2) promote: (line 381) declares no job-level permissions: block, so it inherits the workflow-level permissions: at lines 45-47 — including packages: write # push the versioned agent image to ghcr.io on release, which is only needed by the GHCR steps in the release job. Add permissions: {contents: read} to promote (its writes go through the app token, not GITHUB_TOKEN) and, while there, permissions: {} to verify-published-action.yml's e2e job, which has no checkout and needs none of the contents: read granted at its line 31-32. CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N
2. [Axis 4] Unpinned global npm install of the agent runtime in an unattended nightly job that forwards ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:283) — verify-published-action.yml:283 runs run: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code with no version constraint and no integrity pin, and the same job then forwards a repository secret into the run at line 331 ( ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=${{ secrets.ANTHROPIC_API_KEY }}) on a GitHub-hosted runner with no container isolation. Any upstream/registry compromise of that package executes with the key in its environment. This matches five pre-existing instances in pr-checks.yml (lines 288, 381, 545, 784, 852), so it is the repo's convention rather than a new pattern — but the marginal exposure is genuinely wider here, because this is the first such job on an unattended schedule: (line 27-28, cron: "17 6 * * *") rather than a human-reviewed PR run, so a poisoned publish is pulled and executed nightly with no one watching. Note the tension with intent: the header comment at line 25 lists "the @anthropic-ai/claude-code npm package" as drift this nightly is meant to catch, so a hard pin defeats a stated purpose. Recommended resolution is one of: pin a major/minor (@anthropic-ai/claude-code@^2) so drift is still detected within a reviewed range; or record it as an explicit accepted risk in this file's header, the way action.yml:21-22 and release.yml:480-487 already document their accepted risks. CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N
3. [Axis 5] workflow_run couples to release.yml by display name with no guard, so renaming the workflow silently disables release-time verification (.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:18) — Line 18 workflows: ["Release"] matches release.yml:1 name: Release by string. GitHub does not error on an unmatched name — the trigger simply never fires — so renaming release.yml's name: degrades this gate to schedule-only (cron at line 28) with no signal, which is exactly the silently-inert-check failure the file's own comments argue against (lines 11-14, 105-108). This is cheap to guard following the existing precedent in tests/test_pr_review_workflow.py (which already parses a workflow YAML by path): assert yaml.safe_load('.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml')['on']['workflow_run']['workflows'] == [yaml.safe_load('.github/workflows/release.yml')['name']].
4. [Axis 6] Upload run on failure never fires in the exact case the e2e design deliberately tolerates, discarding the run dir that would explain a model flake (.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:418) — Line 418: if: failure(). The "Run the published action" step is continue-on-error: true (line 320), so when it goes red but the artifact gate passes, the job outcome is success and this step is skipped — runs/verify-published/ (run.json, task.json, task.log) is thrown away precisely in the scenario the design says will happen routinely ("a model flake failing file_exists would redden this step", lines 310-317). Fix: if: always(), or if: failure() || steps.run.outcome != 'success', so the diagnostic artifacts survive a tolerated red action step.
5. [Axis 6] e2e gate assertions can pass vacuously: JUnit check only parses the XML (zero testcases passes) and the output-wiring check silently skips when the action step is red but outputs are non-empty and wrong (.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:370) — Lines 366-372 assert OUT_JUNIT/OUT_RUNDIR only when STEP_OUTCOME = success, then line 370: elif [ -z "$OUT_JUNIT" ] || [ -z "$OUT_RUNDIR" ]; then warns only about empty outputs. A red step that propagates non-empty but incorrect outputs (e.g. a future action.yml regression writing the wrong path to $GITHUB_OUTPUT) falls through both branches with no assertion and no message. Fix: in the non-success branch, compare the outputs when they are non-empty and emit a ::warning on mismatch (still not a hard fail, per the step's stated rationale) so the wiring contract is never silently unchecked.

What's Missing

Parallel paths:

• 🟠 🟠 The diff's own thesis — nothing consumer-visible is promoted before the wheel is on PyPI — was applied to the v0 tag and the GitHub Release but NOT to the GHCR agent image: release.yml's "Compute image tags"/"Build and push versioned agent image" (lines ~262-300) still push coder-eval-agent:<version> and move :latest inside the release job, before publish-pypi runs, and under continue-on-error: true. So a release whose PyPI publish fails still advertises :latest for a version that does not exist on PyPI (docs/DOCKER_ISOLATION.md tells users to FROM coder-eval-agent:<version>), and a silently-failed push leaves a fully green release with no image at all. Either move the image push behind publish-pypi (as the tag move now is) or state in the promote header why the image is deliberately exempt. (trigger: .github/workflows/release.yml)
• 🟡 🟡 The new verification tier covers PyPI + Marketplace + the v0 pin, but not the one release artifact published best-effort (continue-on-error: true on all three GHCR steps in release.yml): ghcr.io/uipath/coder-eval-agent:<version>/:latest. A trivial docker manifest inspect (or a skopeo/curl HEAD against the GHCR API) in preflight would close the highest-probability silent gap, since a missing image is the only published artifact whose absence currently produces a green release. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml)
• 🟡 🟡 The parity step hard-fails on a major bump with "Bump the uses: in this workflow" (verify-published-action.yml:84-87) — naming only itself, while uses: UiPath/coder_eval@v0 is hardcoded in four doc snippets (README.md:111,148, docs/CI_GATE.md:31,77, docs/tutorials/02-ci-pipeline.md:174) and CE026 checks the Marketplace slug but never the major. On 1.0.0 the nightly reddens and the docs keep telling consumers to pin a stale major; either extend the error message to enumerate the doc surfaces or add a CE026 clause asserting every coder_eval@v<major> matches pyproject.toml's major. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml)
• 🟡 🟡 CE026's REQUIRED_PREREQ_TOKENS stays pinned to a single executable reference — action-dogfood in pr-checks.yml (tests/lint/action_docs.py:DOGFOOD_JOB, tests/test_custom_lint.py::test_required_prereqs_match_the_dogfood_job) — but the new e2e job (verify-published-action.yml:278-283) is now a third copy of the same two prereq steps and the truer consumer proof (no checkout, published action, default pin). The lint's PR_CHECKS path was not extended, so the two jobs can drift and the docs will follow only one. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml)
• 🟡 🟡 promote was redesigned around the skipped-green hazard (ref gate + in-job "Validate version shape") but the sibling publish-pypi kept the exact shape the new comment condemns (if: needs.release.outputs.version != '', release.yml:321) — and since promote now declares needs: [release, publish-pypi], a skipped publish-pypi skips the promotion too, making the new in-job enforcement unreachable in the one scenario it was written for. The hardening was applied to one of the two jobs that share the pattern. (trigger: .github/workflows/release.yml) (restates: Axis 6: publish-pypi's dead if-gate can still silently skip it)

Tests:

• 🟠 🟠 Nothing statically binds a steps.<id>.outputs.<key> expression to the keys that step actually writes to $GITHUB_OUTPUT, which is exactly why the steps.parity.outputs.version bug ships red on 100% of runs. The repo already parses workflow YAML in tests (tests/test_pr_review_workflow.py) — a ~20-line test (or a new CEnnn) that collects echo "k=..." >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT keys per step id and asserts every steps.X.outputs.Y reference resolves would have caught it at make verify, before merge. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml) (restates: Axis 1: Preflight references a nonexistent steps.parity.outputs.version)
• 🟠 🟠 The inline consumer task YAML (verify-published-action.yml:289-307) is a whole TaskDefinition document (task_id + initial_prompt + success_criteria) that no test validates, while CE029 (tests/lint/doc_examples.py) already validates precisely that shape wherever it appears in Markdown. A rename of setting_sources/permission_mode/allowed_tools, or any extra="forbid" violation, now surfaces only in the paid nightly as an opaque action failure. Extend CE029's extractor to heredoc YAML under .github/workflows/, or add a test that loads the heredoc and constructs TaskDefinition. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml)
• 🟡 🟡 The action's score-gate failure direction is still never exercised: both consumer-simulating jobs pass minimum-task-score: "0.0" (verify-published-action.yml:329 and action-dogfood:868), so the gate is only ever proven to pass. The new exit-contract check (lines 400-411) catches a gate that wrongly fails, but nothing catches a gate that wrongly passes — the direction that silently disables every consumer's quality gate. A cheap addition: one more step invoking the action with a score floor the smoke task cannot meet and asserting steps.<id>.outcome == 'failure'. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml)
• 🔵 🔵 step-summary (action.yml's only other behavioral input, default true, appending run.md to $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY at action.yml:160) is asserted by neither consumer job, despite the new step being titled "Verify action mechanics" — one grep -q against $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY would cover it while the run dir is still on disk. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml)

Daily/nightly:

• 🟠 🟠 This adds the repo's first token-spending unattended cron (17 6 * * *; the only other cron is codeql's weekly scan) and the blast radius is never stated: recurring Haiku spend on secrets.ANTHROPIC_API_KEY shared with the ADO nightly, who owns a nightly red, and the fact that no workflow in this repo has any failure notification path (no Slack step, no issue-on-failure) — so the artifact-verification signal this PR exists to create lands only in the Actions tab. Combined with the critical undefined-output bug it will be red from day one, which is the documented way a check earns being ignored. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml)
• 🟡 🟡 Neither trigger this gate depends on can fire from a branch — schedule: and workflow_run: only run from the default branch — so all 423 lines are unexercisable before merge (which is how the undefined-output bug reaches main), and GitHub silently disables schedule: after 60 days of repo inactivity. The PR states neither. A workflow_dispatch-able dry-run mode (skip the paid tier, or a --check-only input) plus the workflow-name parity test would make the gate provable pre-merge instead of provable-in-production. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml) (restates: Axis 5: workflow_run couples to release.yml by display name with no guard)
• 🔵 🔵 Unstated false-red window: the 06:17 cron shares no concurrency group with the Release workflow, so a nightly that lands after publish-pypi succeeds but before promote finishes (e.g. while the pypi environment approval is being granted) sees PyPI 200 plus a lagging major tag and hard-fails with "promote did not run" on a release that is mid-promotion. Worth either a short pre-check re-poll of the major tag or a sentence in the header acknowledging the race. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml)

Downstream consumers:

• 🟡 🟡 The # <-- kept in sync pin anchor now has THREE readers with three different tolerances: release.yml's sed demands exactly three spaces before #, tests/test_action_version_pin.py::_PIN_PATTERN accepts [ \t]+, and the new workflow (verify-published-action.yml:92-97) accepts [[:space:]]+. Nothing asserts they agree, so a future reformat can leave the new step reporting "parity OK" on a pin the release-time sed silently refused to bump. Extending test_action_version_pin.py (whose docstring already claims to guard this anchor) with the workflow's regex is a two-line fix. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml) (restates: Axis 3: Release/action metadata re-derived inline in workflow shell instead of reusing the existing unit-tested helpers)
• 🟡 🟡 The new gate hardcodes the run.json consumer contract (task_results, status, weighted_score, total_tokens) as shell/Python string keys against reports_experiment.eval_result_to_task_dict, joining action.yml's score gate in the same unbound coupling. This diff records the gap as a deferred candidate in .claude/harness-candidates.md ("Runtime-key parity for run.json consumers outside src/") but ships nothing that closes it, so a key rename in src/ still turns two external gates into no-ops silently. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml) (restates: Axis 1: Workflow decision logic and inline consumer task YAML live in oversized inline run: blocks with zero pre-merge test/lint coverage)
• 🟡 🟡 The release procedure gained a third job, a new recovery flow ("re-run publish-pypi, then promote"), and a new failure taxonomy the nightly emits verbatim to operators ("Stranded action.yml pin", "promote did not run", "Release incomplete") — none of which exists outside workflow comments. CONTRIBUTING.md has no release section, and the only prose about release.yml is one line in CLAUDE.md's tree listing that still describes it as maintaining the pin plus the moving tag, naming neither promote nor the new verification workflow. Whoever pages on the first nightly red has to read 700 lines of YAML to find the runbook. (trigger: .github/workflows/release.yml)

Display & mapping dicts:

• 🟡 🟡 The exit-contract assertion re-encodes a FinalStatus value as the bare string "SUCCESS" (verify-published-action.yml:407) and treats every other status as "model under-performed, tolerate the red step" — collapsing ERROR, BUILD_FAILED, TIMEOUT, and TOKEN_BUDGET_EXCEEDED into the model-flake bucket, even though those are precisely the harness/wiring failures this gate exists to catch. models/enums.py deliberately routes this through _STATUS_CATEGORIES with a no-catch-all assert so a new status cannot silently collapse; the workflow bypasses that SSOT. Assert on the category (succeeded vs error) rather than one literal, so an action-side ERROR with non-zero tokens cannot pass green. (trigger: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml)

Harness & Lint Improvements

Static checks (lint / type):

• [ce-lint] CE035 — workflow output-key parity. New whole-tree lint test class (wire as a @pytest.mark.lint class in tests/test_custom_lint.py alongside CE026–CE031, with the resolver in a new tests/lint/workflow_outputs.py; it reasons over YAML + run: text, so it is not a BaseRule): for every ${{ steps.<id>.outputs.<key> }} and ${{ needs.<job>.outputs.<key> }} expression in .github/workflows/** and action.yml, resolve the writer and fail when the key is never produced. Writers are mechanically enumerable: echo "<key>=…" >> "$GITHUB_OUTPUT" (and printf/heredoc forms) inside the step whose id: matches; the outputs: block of a local composite (uses: ./ → action.yml:79-86); the outputs: map of the referenced job; a pinned third-party action's declared outputs (allowlisted by SHA, no network). Scale is tractable today: 48 steps.*.outputs.* + 8 needs.*.outputs.* references against 11 $GITHUB_OUTPUT write sites. Claim the next free id at implementation time (CE032–CE034 are reserved by .claude/harness-candidates.md; tests/lint/runner.py's id-uniqueness assert is the SSOT). Prevents: The critical finding reported by 7 of 8 axes: .github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:202 and :247 read steps.parity.outputs.version, but the parity step writes only pin/newest/lagging (124-128). TAG_REF becomes the bare string v, git show "v:action.yml" exits 128 under set -euo pipefail, preflight is red on 100% of triggers, and e2e (needs: preflight) never runs; line 247 would also emit uv tool install "coder-eval==". An actionlint-only adoption does not close this — it validates the step id but models steps.*.outputs as an open string map, so an unwritten shell key is untyped and unflagged.
• [ce-lint] CE036 — ban the skipped-green job gate. Fail any job-level if: in .github/workflows/** whose only discriminator is an emptiness/equality test on needs.<job>.outputs.<key> (!= '', == '', …). The repo already documents this exact shape as an anti-pattern in prose (release.yml:386-391: a lost output on a partial "Re-run failed jobs" resolves the job to SKIPPED-GREEN), and the promote redesign in this diff was the manual application of that lesson — the rule turns the prose into enforcement. Escape hatch: inline # noqa: CE036 — <reason> for genuinely value-driven gates that cannot strand a release. Prevents: The high finding at release.yml:321 (if: needs.release.outputs.version != '' on publish-pypi). Since promote now declares needs: [release, publish-pypi] (line 383), a silently-skipped publish-pypi also skips the v0 move and the GitHub Release — a fully green run with nothing published — and skips promote's own "Validate version shape" (413-424), the step written to enforce exactly that scenario. The guard is also provably dead (line 188 already exit 1s on an empty version), which a reviewer had to notice by hand.
• [ce-lint] CE037 — if: failure() is wrong in a job containing a continue-on-error step. In any job with a continue-on-error: true step, fail on a diagnostic/upload step guarded by if: failure() (or cancelled()) that does not also reference the tolerated step's steps.<id>.outcome; require always() or failure() || steps.<id>.outcome != 'success'. Pure YAML shape check, ~30 lines, same test-class slot as CE035. Prevents: The finding at verify-published-action.yml:418: "Run the published action" is continue-on-error: true (line 320), so in the routine tolerated-red case the design itself predicts (310-317, "a model flake failing file_exists would redden this step") the job outcome is success, if: failure() is skipped, and runs/verify-published/ (run.json, task.json, task.log) — the only evidence explaining the flake — is discarded precisely when needed.
• [ce-lint] CE038 — workflow_run.workflows entries must name a real workflow. Assert every string under on.workflow_run.workflows in .github/workflows/** equals the name: of some workflow file in that directory. Six-line YAML check; tests/test_pr_review_workflow.py already establishes the precedent of parsing a workflow YAML by path. Prevents: The finding at verify-published-action.yml:18 (workflows: ["Release"] coupled to release.yml:1 by display string). GitHub does not error on an unmatched name — the trigger simply never fires — so renaming release.yml's name: silently degrades release-time verification to schedule-only, the "silently inert check" failure mode the file's own comments (11-14, 105-108) argue against.
• [ce-lint] CE039 — runtime-key parity for run.json consumers outside src/ (promotes and widens the candidate already booked in .claude/harness-candidates.md). AST-extract the key set written by eval_result_to_task_dict (src/coder_eval/reports_experiment.py, dict literal ~136-189) and assert every string key a non-Python consumer reads — .github/workflows/** and action.yml: task_results, task_id, status, weighted_score, total_tokens, plus error_category once the zero-token branch consumes it — exists in that set. Mirrors how CE030 pins doc/schema parity; grep consumers for r.get("…") / data.get("…") / jq-style key paths. Prevents: The run.json contract half of the maintainability finding at verify-published-action.yml:349 and the vacuous/misdiagnosing gates at :370 and :395. Concretely: the comment at 385-388 exists only because a reviewer proposed final_status, a key absent from run.json that would have made the exit-contract assertion dead on arrival — a prose warning where a mechanical gate belongs. It also makes the recommended fix for the zero-token misdiagnosis (branch on status/error_category) safe to write.
• [ce-lint] CE040 — cap inline run: bodies; oversized decision logic must live in .github/scripts/. Fail a run: body in .github/workflows/** exceeding ~35 lines, or one that switches interpreter mid-step (bash assertions then a python3 <<'PY' heredoc), unless it is a thin invocation of a .github/scripts/ module. Directly analogous to the existing CE022 statement cap on the simulation dialog loop, and composes with the already-booked CE032 (run the AST rules over embedded Python) / CE033 (quoted heredoc delimiters). Measured bodies in scope today are 70, 66, 37, 27, 24, 19, 6 (verify-published-action.yml) and 31, 22, 19, … (release.yml), so the rule flags exactly the oversized blocks and nothing else. Prevents: The maintainability finding at verify-published-action.yml:349 — and, more importantly, it is the structural reason the critical steps.parity.outputs.version bug survived: it lives inside the 70-line "Check tag / pin parity" block (59-129) with 6 decision points and zero coverage from make check, make lint, pyright, or any test. Extraction is what makes the parity logic, the HTTP classification, and the run.json gate unit-testable at all (precedent: .github/scripts/release_notes.py + tests/test_release_notes.py).
• [ce-lint] CE041 — one Marketplace slugger (extend CE026 to .github/workflows/**). CE026 already owns Action-listing parity but drives off tests/lint/action_docs.py:83-87::default_doc_paths, which returns only README.md + docs/**/*.md. Extend it to (a) include workflow files when checking github.com/marketplace/actions/<slug> links and (b) forbid any second slug derivation in the repo — grep for a tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr ' ' '-' pipeline (or any hand-rolled lowercase/space substitution) applied to a value read from action.yml's name:. The one tested derivation is tests/lint/action_docs.py:165-168::marketplace_slug. Prevents: The DRY/test-health finding at verify-published-action.yml:209. The shell slugger drops none of the punctuation and collapses none of the whitespace marketplace_slug does: Coder Eval (CI gate) → coder-eval-(ci-gate) vs. coder-eval-ci-gate. They agree today only because action.yml:6 is name: coder_eval, the single input where both are identity — so a rename passes make verify green while the workflow 404s and fires ::error title=Marketplace listing missing, reddening preflight for a healthy listing.
• [ce-lint] CE042 — skip-existing: true requires an in-job artifact-identity assertion. Fail a pypa/gh-action-pypi-publish step that sets skip-existing: true in a consumer-facing publish job unless the same job also contains a digest comparison (grep for digests / sha256sum / an attestation verification step) or carries an inline # noqa: CE042 — <accepted risk>. Shape-only: the rule enforces that some identity gate exists, not how it is written. Prevents: The medium security finding at release.yml:349. skip-existing makes twine treat PyPI's 400 "File already exists" as success without comparing content, so a green publish-pypi no longer proves the wheel built in this run is what PyPI serves. Nothing downstream re-establishes it: promote moves v0 on job success alone (462-463) and preflight asserts only reachability ([ "$CODE" = "200" ], verify-published-action.yml:142-150). A repo-wide grep confirms no sha256/attestation assertion anywhere in the release→promote→verify chain.
• [bandit-codeql] Adopt the workflow static-analysis tier: actionlint + zizmor (+ shellcheck via actionlint) over .github/workflows/** and action.yml, as a make lint-workflows target folded into make verify plus a pr-checks.yml job (start non-blocking, promote to required). This is the workflow-shaped analogue of the bandit/pip-audit tier and is genuinely absent: a repo-wide grep across Makefile, .pre-commit-config.yaml, and every workflow finds no actionlint, zizmor, or shellcheck invocation (sole hit: a # shellcheck disable=SC2206 comment in action.yml — someone assumed a checker that never runs). It subsumes the booked CE026 floating-uses-ref candidate, and zizmor's excessive-permissions covers the permissions findings without a bespoke rule. State the boundary explicitly: this tier does not replace CE035 (open-map output typing) or CE034 (verified: actionlint+shellcheck do not flag the VAR=$(… | grep …)-under-set -e dead diagnostic). Prevents: The two low security findings — release.yml:399-404 mints a create-github-app-token with no permission-* inputs (full installation scope, and this is the app holding the main-branch ruleset bypass) while promote declares no job-level permissions: and inherits packages: write it never uses (zizmor excessive-permissions); and verify-published-action.yml:283's unpinned npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code in an unattended nightly that forwards ANTHROPIC_API_KEY at line 331 (floating-dependency + credential-exposure rules, making the pin-or-accept decision a recorded one). Also the general net under the shell-quality half of the :349 finding.

Harness improvements (not statically reachable):

• Extract the three decision units into .github/scripts/ and unit-test them against fixtures — (1) tag/pin/lag parity resolution (verify-published-action.yml:59-129), (2) a single classify_http(code) shared by all three PyPI/Marketplace probes, (3) the run.json e2e gate (:377-411). Add tests/test_verify_published_scripts.py mirroring tests/test_release_notes.py (which loads .github/scripts/release_notes.py by path via importlib), plus a pr-checks.yml job on paths: ['.github/**']. Fixture tables: tag lists (lagging / in-sync / missing-pin), HTTP codes (200, 000, 403, 429, 503, 404), and run.json blobs (zero rows, total_tokens: null, status: ERROR + error_category: agent_rate_limit, all-SUCCESS-with-red-step). Why not static: CE040 can force the extraction and CE039 can pin the key names, but neither can check the logic is right: that a sustained 429 classifies as inconclusive rather than "Stranded action.yml pin", that lagging=true selects the pin rather than the newest version, or that a zero-token run with error_category=agent_rate_limit warns instead of asserting broken credential passthrough. Those are input→verdict behaviors and need executed code over fixtures. Prevents: The HTTP-classification finding at verify-published-action.yml:164 (403/429/5xx misreported as a stranded pin, with an instruction — re-run publish-pypi — PyPI will reject as a duplicate) and its harmless twin at :191; the zero-token misdiagnosis at :395; the :349 no-coverage finding; and it would have caught the critical steps.parity.outputs.version bug on first execution.
• Add an if: always() guard job to both release.yml and verify-published-action.yml that reads every expected job's result from needs and fails when any is skipped/cancelled on a path where it was supposed to run (on main: release, publish-pypi, promote must all be success). One job, ~10 lines, no new tooling. Why not static: The hazard is a runtime job result, not a YAML shape: a job may be legitimately skipped (prerelease dispatch, non-default branch) or hazardously skipped (lost needs output on a partial re-run). Only the running workflow knows which case it is in, so the assertion must execute inside the run. CE036 removes the known trigger; this catches the class. Prevents: The green-but-nothing-ran outcomes in both the release.yml:321 finding (publish-pypi skipped → promote skipped → GREEN run, wheel unpublished, v0 unmoved) and the critical :202 finding (preflight red → the paid e2e tier this change exists to add never runs, and nothing announces its absence).
• Make the e2e assertions non-vacuous and keep the evidence. In the gate step: assert the JUnit report contains ≥1 <testcase> and that the count matches the number of task_results rows (today it only calls ET.parse, so a zero-testcase report passes); in the non-success branch, compare non-empty composite outputs against the expected paths and ::warning on mismatch instead of falling through silently; and switch the diagnostic upload to if: always(). Why not static: These are assertions about a produced artifact (testcase count; output values as the runner materializes them for a red composite step), so they exist only at run time. A lint rule can require an always()-guarded upload (CE037) but cannot know whether the XML the action wrote contains any tests. Prevents: The two weak-assertion findings at verify-published-action.yml:370 (a red step propagating non-empty-but-wrong outputs falls through both branches with no message) and :418, plus the JUnit parse-only half of :360.
• Assert published-artifact identity at release time. After publish-pypi, fetch https://pypi.org/pypi/coder-eval/<version>/json, match each urls[] entry by filename, and compare digests.sha256 against sha256sum dist/*, failing on mismatch (keep skip-existing for the re-run story it was added for); optionally also require a PEP 740 attestation from this workflow. Then have preflight's PyPI probe reuse that digest instead of settling for HTTP 200. Why not static: It needs the live PyPI response and the locally built artifacts; CE042 can only enforce that such a step exists, never that the digests match. Note the pre-diff protection was incidental (a duplicate upload failed loudly) — nothing declared the contract. Prevents: The release.yml:349 security finding: with no identity assertion anywhere in release→promote→verify, a wheel pre-uploaded under the release's exact version is silently accepted, v0 is promoted to an action.yml pinning it, and every uses: UiPath/coder_eval@v0 consumer installs it on a fully green release. The lag classifier compounds it by telling the operator to "re-run promote", i.e. to promote onto the unverified artifact.
• Treat the new unattended workflow as needing a first-run proof and a watcher. Before relying on it, workflow_dispatch it once and require a green run (which would have surfaced the exit-128 preflight immediately). Ongoing: route a failed scheduled run to a durable signal — open/update a tracking issue or post to the release channel — rather than relying on someone opening the Actions tab; same for a scheduled run where e2e resolved to skipped. Why not static: Nothing about the YAML is wrong; the gap is that a nightly, non-required workflow with no notification channel can stay red for weeks with no observer — exactly how a 100%-failing preflight would have persisted. Detecting it needs run history, not file shape. Prevents: The critical :202 finding's blast radius (silently red preflight ⇒ permanently skipped paid tier) and the :18 finding's silent degradation-to-schedule-only mode.
• Process note, not automatable: rationale comments explaining a mechanism 300+ lines away are drift-prone; keep rationale with the code it governs (which the .github/scripts/ extraction enables — a docstring next to a tested function). For the specific instance, rewrite release.yml:61-63 to say what actually enforces emptiness (promote is ref-gated at line 392; emptiness is validated in-job by "Validate version shape", 413-424) rather than claiming promote gates on released_version — and do not collapse released_version into version: the verify pass showed they are semantically different off main (a branch dispatch sets version to the rc while released_version stays empty). Why not static: Deciding whether a sentence about promote contradicts an if: expression 330 lines below is semantic judgment; no grep or AST shape separates an accurate rationale from a stale one. Recorded explicitly so the reach of static analysis on this finding class is a deliberate decision, not an omission. Prevents: The comment/rationale-drift finding at release.yml:62 and its grouped instances (verify-published-action.yml:34, :131, :374; release.yml:244, :488), including the false claim at verify-published-action.yml:200-201 that the version and major tags are the same commit — which lines 119-122 explicitly contradict in the lagging=true branch.

Top 5 Priority Actions

1. Fix the undefined step output that reddens preflight on every single run regardless of the artifact's actual health: /Users/religa/src/coder_eval/.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:202 expands TAG_REF to the bare string v (so git show "v:action.yml" exits 128 under set -euo pipefail, killing the job before any Marketplace diagnostic and skipping e2e via needs: preflight) and :247 builds uv tool install "coder-eval==" — key both off the values the parity step actually emits (pin at :125, and the major tag read at :92), and correct the now-false comment at :200-201 that claims the version tag and major tag are the same commit even in the lagging=true branch.
2. Delete the dead gate at /Users/religa/src/coder_eval/.github/workflows/release.yml:321 (if: needs.release.outputs.version != '') — it can never be false on a successful release job (:188 already hard-fails on an empty version), but under the author's own stated partial-re-run hazard it resolves publish-pypi to SKIPPED-GREEN, which also skips promote (needs: [release, publish-pypi], :383) and therefore makes promote's entire "Validate version shape" hardening (:413-424) unreachable in exactly the recovery flow it was written for, yielding a green run with no wheel and an unmoved v0.
3. Stop the daily e2e gate from blaming credential/runtime wiring for an upstream outage: at /Users/religa/src/coder_eval/.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:395 the tokens <= 0 branch hard-fails with a fixed "the agent never reached the model … wiring is broken" message even though total_tokens is null for a transient 429/529 or sandbox-setup failure, so branch on the status/error_category already written into every run.json row (src/coder_eval/reports_experiment.py:138 and :189) and warn for agent/API categories; while there change :418 from if: failure() to if: always() so the run dir survives the tolerated-red case the design says is routine.
4. Apply the transient-vs-definitive HTTP split the same job already gets right for the Marketplace probe (:233) to the two PyPI probes at /Users/religa/src/coder_eval/.github/workflows/verify-published-action.yml:164 and :191 — today a sustained 403/429/5xx yields a confidently wrong ::error title=Stranded action.yml pin telling the operator to re-publish an already-published, healthy version (an upload PyPI will reject as a duplicate); keep the branch red as the e2e gate demands, but reserve the "stranded pin" title for a definitive 404.
5. Close the supply-chain and least-privilege gaps opened by the new promote job: /Users/religa/src/coder_eval/.github/workflows/release.yml:349's skip-existing: true removes the only step that incidentally proved PyPI serves this run's artifact, and nothing before the v0 tag move (:462-463) re-asserts identity — compare urls[].digests.sha256 from the version JSON the preflight already fetches against sha256sum dist/*, add permission-contents: write to the unscoped app-token mints (:80, :401), and drop the inherited packages: write from promote (:381); this is also the moment to extract the two untested 70-line inline blocks (verify-published-action.yml:59-129 and :349-415) into .github/scripts/ with fixture tests following the release_notes.py precedent, including slug parity against tests/lint/action_docs.py:165::marketplace_slug — no static analysis runs over workflow YAML today, which is why finding #1 shipped.

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Stats: 1 🔴 · 1 🟠 · 6 🟡 · 5 🔵 across 8 axes reviewed.

[akshaylive]

Nice work here — the release/promote redesign and the new verification tier are well thought through, and the review history shows a lot of care already went into hardening the failure modes. I double-checked the two blockers from the posted review directly against the checked-out branch, and both are real and still present:

1. steps.parity.outputs.version doesn't exist — preflight fails on every run

The parity step only emits pin, newest, and lagging (verify-published-action.yml:124-128):

{
  echo "pin=$PIN"
  echo "newest=$VERSION"
  echo "lagging=$LAGGING"
} >> "$GITHUB_OUTPUT"

But two later steps reference steps.parity.outputs.version, which resolves to empty:

• Line 202: TAG_REF: v${{ steps.parity.outputs.version }} → git show "v:action.yml" fails.
• Line 247: VERSION: ${{ steps.parity.outputs.version }} → uv tool install "coder-eval==" fails.

Since e2e depends on needs: preflight, this means preflight is red on every trigger and the paid e2e tier — the whole point of this PR — never runs. Easiest fix is probably swapping in steps.parity.outputs.pin at both sites, since the pin is the actual consumer contract this tier is meant to verify (and using newest instead would break under the legitimate lagging=true state).

2. publish-pypi's if: still has the skipped-green hazard that promote was just fixed to avoid

release.yml:321 still gates publish-pypi on:

if: needs.release.outputs.version != ''

promote's own comment right above it explains why this shape is risky — a lost output on a partial "Re-run failed jobs" resolves to skipped-green rather than failing loudly — and promote was switched to gate on github.ref instead. But publish-pypi is still on the old pattern, and since promote requires needs: [release, publish-pypi], a skipped publish-pypi silently skips promote too. That's the exact recovery scenario this whole PR is built around, so it'd be good to bring publish-pypi in line with promote's approach (or just drop the guard, since release's "Resolve published version" step at line 188 already hard-fails on an empty version, making this condition dead weight either way).

Everything else in the earlier review (rationale-comment drift, the PyPI probe's missing transient-code handling, GHCR image push not being gated behind publish-pypi, etc.) reads as solid non-blocking feedback for a follow-up pass. Happy to help with either fix if useful!