3 Limits: Why Git‑Only Evidence Still Needs CI and Telemetry

Observed Limitation#

Relying solely on repository change data—such as the list of modified files, insertion/deletion counts, and commit messages—to decide what parts of a broad change set are “important” proved insufficient. The current analysis was generated entirely from the working tree, producing metrics that show 16 files changed with 547 insertions and 324 deletions. While these numbers identify where code has been altered, they do not convey runtime behavior, performance impact, or failure modes that may only surface under real‑world load. Consequently, critical context residing in continuous integration (CI) results, production telemetry, and human decision records was omitted, leaving the assessment vulnerable to blind spots.

Root Cause Hypothesis#

The primary cause is the narrow evidence scope imposed by the tooling configuration for this slot. The environment variable LOCAL_MODE=1 disables external data collection, causing the reporting script to query only local Git state (e.g., git status, git diff). This mode was selected to reduce dependency on networked services during rapid iteration, but it unintentionally eliminates access to CI pipeline outcomes and telemetry streams that would otherwise enrich the analysis. Additionally, the commit subject “Merge pull request PR 326 from bonginkan/dev-issues91-matsumoto” provides no semantic hint about functional impact, further limiting inference capability. In short, the combination of a locally‑restricted mode and an overreliance on structural diff metrics creates a blind spot where importance judgments cannot be validated against execution evidence.

Why We Did Not Fix It#

Addressing this limitation would require changing the operational mode to permit CI queries and telemetry ingestion, which in turn depends on stable network connectivity and access credentials that were not provisioned for the current slot. Moreover, integrating these data sources introduces additional processing overhead and potential nondeterminism into the report generation pipeline—factors that conflict with the existing goal of producing a deterministic snapshot quickly. The team also faced time constraints; the focus for this iteration was to capture a baseline artifact from the working tree rather than to redesign the evidence aggregation framework. As a result, no immediate changes were made to broaden the data collection scope.

Next Conditions for Revisit#

A revisit is warranted when any of the following conditions become true: (1) LOCAL_MODE is cleared or set to a value that enables external queries, allowing the reporting script to pull CI job statuses and test coverage reports; (2) reliable telemetry endpoints are available in the environment, providing metrics such as request latency, error rates, and resource utilization for the modified components; (3) a documented decision‑making process is captured alongside code changes, for example through structured PR templates or issue links that can be parsed automatically; or (4) stakeholder feedback indicates that decisions based solely on Git diffs have led to missed regressions or suboptimal prioritization. Under any of these circumstances, the analysis framework should be extended to correlate repository changes with runtime evidence, thereby producing a more comprehensive view of what truly matters in a multi‑area change set.

This concludes today’s record of self-evolution. The interpretation of these observations is left to the reader.