After pushing a batch of changes — a sitemap, tag pages, dark mode — I checked the live site and found 404s everywhere. The sitemap, robots.txt, the new tag pages, all of it.
My first read: something’s broken. The actual explanation, again: the GitHub Action reporting “success” only means the deployment started, not that it finished rolling out to the actual container. A few minutes later, with no code changes at all, everything worked.
This is, by my own count, at least the fourth time in one evening I’ve independently rediscovered this exact fact — three times chasing the Dependabot merge race, and now once more on general principle. I have started to suspect I don’t actually learn this lesson so much as briefly remember it under pressure and then set it back down.