The Restart That Ate the Refactor: A Cold-Start Postmortem for Coding Agents

Описание и применение

Скрипт проверки холодного старта предотвращает удаление сгенерированных файлов после перезапуска сервера, обеспечивая стабильность CI.

A coding agent deleted a generated artifact after a server restart, causing a CI failure because the artifact was not persisted in the repository.

The cold‑start check prevented silent deletion of generated artifacts, ensuring CI stability on transient servers.

1. Create an artifact manifest (.agent/artifacts.json) listing required generated files and a regenerate command.
2. Add a preflight script (cold_start_check.sh) that: a) ensures the repo is clean, b) verifies each listed artifact exists, c) runs the build with a clean output directory.
3. Instruct the agent to run the cold‑start check before reporting task completion, and to regenerate artifacts if the check fails.
4. Run the cold‑start check on every server restart to catch persistence issues early.

First, reproduce from a pristine tree before blaming the agent, because a dirty workspace can mask any number of environment sins.

Here is the cold-start check I now run before any agent task, together with a small manifest that declares which artifacts must exist.