The crash that wasn't: debugging CI with AI
A developer spent hours debugging a CI smoke test that falsely reported a crash. Using AI and a custom crash-capture toolkit, they discovered the process exited normally but the test misinterpreted a signal.
A CI smoke test told me Kinjo had crashed. Kinjo had actually exited successfully.
That distinction took a few hours, several AI sessions, a handful of discarded hypotheses, and a small crash-capture toolkit to uncover.
I was updating dependencies in Kinjo, my side project for browsing local DNS-SD and mDNS services from a terminal UI. Its CI suite includes a smoke test that starts Kinjo inside tmux, sends it some keystrokes, and checks that it quits cleanly. Intermittently, the test instead reported:
drive-tui: pane exited via a signal (no exit code)