Debugging CI Failures

Debugging PostHog CI failures

Before you propose a change to CI, check things already tried for the idea. It records what was measured, and why some good-sounding changes were reverted or rejected.

Find the first meaningful failure, classify it, reproduce the smallest useful case locally when appropriate, and report the result. Avoid public-visible or irreversible actions unless the user explicitly asks.

Always start with the hogli ci:insights digest. It aggregates across runs and branches, which gh cannot do cheaply, and tells you whether a failure is likely trunk-borne, gate-only, or isolated to a small set of branches. gh is authoritative for one run's current state and attribution. Use the digest to decide what to inspect; use gh to confirm whose failure it is and exactly what failed in a given run.

This skill triages and classifies. Once a failure is confirmed flaky, hand off to the fixing-flaky-tests skill, which owns local reproduction, root-cause fixing, and N-run validation. For "who broke master" — the culprit commit and the commit that fixed it — hand off to the investigating-ci-failures skill, which owns the green/red boundary analysis. For aggregate pipeline health (is CI getting slower, which workflow is the long pole, how long PRs take to merge), read diagnosing-ci-and-merge-bottlenecks. Both are product skills under products/engineering_analytics/skills/, not invocable here: read the SKILL.md at that path.

Rule out a platform outage first

GitHub Actions goes down often enough that it belongs before any log reading, and a platform incident makes every other signal a symptom. It costs two page loads: https://www.githubstatus.com/ for GitHub, https://status.depot.dev/ for the runners. Check them whenever failures are broad — several workflows at once, a burst of runs failing together, jobs dying before Checkout, or anything red across unrelated PRs.

Report an outage as an outage, name the component, and stop recommending reruns.

Safety rules

Do not do any of these without explicit approval in the current conversation:

• Rerun or cancel a GitHub Actions run.
• Post a GitHub comment, PR review, or issue comment through any CLI, MCP, or API tool.
• Push commits, force-push, rename branches, or delete branches.
• Edit .github/workflows/ files (CI infra changes need human review).
• Merge, close, or reopen the PR.
• Accept or update snapshots.

Read-only gh calls and read-only GitHub tools are fine. If you need to change local Git state, make sure it is necessary for the task and does not overwrite unrelated work.

Workflow

1. Start with CI insights (always first)

hogli ci:insights reads PostHog's own engineering analytics — the cross-run failure history a single run can't show. Consult it before any raw gh log archaeology.

hogli ci:insights                                # digest for the current repo + branch
hogli ci:insights search "<error or test name>"  # match a specific failure
hogli ci:insights view <ref>                     # one failure in full
hogli ci:insights view <ref> --logs              # ...plus the failing log lines

• Broad question ("is CI red?", "is master green today?", "what's broken right now?"): the no-arg digest answers directly. It gives the default-branch verdict (how many workflows are failing on their latest run, and which), the live failures grouped by state, the jobs red on trunk right now, a grouped feed of default-branch failures, and the PR your branch belongs to. You often do not need a target PR or run at all; report from the digest.
• Specific failure: run search "<error>" to match it before reading logs, then view <ref> on a row the digest or search printed. --logs prints the thinned failing lines from that failure's latest run, which is usually enough to classify without touching gh.

Read each row's state as a triage ranking:

potentially_resolved is a hint, not a conclusion: confirm from run data before reporting a failure as already fixed.

blocking_merge_queue proves a gate failure happened in the window, not that it still blocks landings. Check the current queue run with gh before reporting it as active. Likewise, confirm pr_only from the current run before assigning the failure to a PR; it is also the fallback when job status is missing or stale.

Caveats to carry into whatever you report:

• Failure grouping is pytest-only. Jest, Playwright, and cargo failures appear only in the digest's grouped master-failures section, never as a row with a ref.
• Every count is absolute, never a rate. Passing runs are not in the test-level data, so there is no denominator to quote. Job conclusions do record greens; the base-rate section below is how to get a real rate from them.
• A run's conclusion can lag until GitHub's workflow_run webhook settles it, so during a live incident confirm a specific run against gh.

If nobody has signed in on this machine, hogli ci:insights exits 78. Treat exit 78 as "no CI insights available" and fall back to the gh-based inspection below — then tell the user they can run hogli posthog:login once, which opens a browser and needs no API key. Do not run it yourself: it waits on a consent screen you cannot see. Surface what you find per the Safety rules — do not auto-apply a fix.

2. Find the failing run (for a specific failure)

Determine the target in this order:

1. If the user gave a PR number, run ID, check name, or branch, use it.
2. Otherwise, infer from the current branch with gh pr view --json number,headRefName,statusCheckRollup.
3. If neither works, ask the user for a PR URL or run ID. Do not guess.

A PR kicked from the merge queue is the exception: its own checks are the wrong target. Trunk tests each queued PR on a trunk-merge/pr-<n>/<uuid> branch holding master plus every PR queued ahead of it whose impacted targets overlap its own. The lane script over-reports targets on purpose, so in practice that is most of the queue. So:

• The failing run is on that branch, never on the PR's head SHA. Take it from trunk merge status <n> (/merging-prs step 4), not gh pr checks. Trunk publishes no check run here. The branch is ephemeral; the run and its logs stay on GitHub, and the warehouse keeps its jobs under that head_branch (query 8 in the investigating-ci-failures references).
• The PR's own checks can be green with the failing job skipped or narrowed. On the PR, path filters see only that diff and the Django suite runs a selected subset; on the queue branch the diff is every carried PR's and the full matrices always run. A docs-only PR can be kicked by a job its own CI never ran.
• The branch names one PR but carries many. A failure on it is not evidence against that PR until you find the change that caused it; the branch's other merge commits are the first suspects.
• In the digest this is the blocking_merge_queue state.

Inspect read-only:

gh pr checks <pr>
gh pr view <pr> --json statusCheckRollup
gh run view <run-id> --json jobs,conclusion,name,workflowName,url
gh run view <run-id> --log-failed

Use the full job log only when --log-failed lacks the failing command or enough surrounding output:

gh run view <run-id> --log --job <job-id>

Given a run id, the engineering-analytics-run-failure-logs MCP tool returns every failed job's error region with original line numbers, already thinned. One call instead of a jobs listing plus a log download, and it works when the job died before any test ran. It is bounded by Logs retention, so fall back to gh for older runs. Given a PR number instead of a run id, engineering-analytics-ci-failure-logs does the same across every run that PR has pushed, so an earlier push's failure is still there.

Extract these before classifying:

• Workflow name or file, e.g. .github/workflows/ci-backend.yml.
• Job name, e.g. backend-tests (4/10).
• Step name, e.g. Run pytest.
• Failing command and the smallest useful output excerpt.

When scanning logs, search for FAIL, Error, error:, assert, Traceback, exit code, and ##[error]. Stop at the first failing step that explains the run's conclusion. Keep excerpts under 40 lines.

For test-job failures, the trunk MCP server's investigate-ci-failure tool is a shortcut past log scanning: give it the run URL (https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/actions/runs/<run-id>) and it returns structured failing-test details — names, error messages, stdout/stderr — from the results CI uploaded to Trunk Flaky Tests, with quarantined known-flaky tests already filtered out. It only covers what ran and uploaded: for jobs that died before tests (build, setup, lint), use engineering-analytics-run-failure-logs or gh run view --log. Authenticate once via /mcp → trunk (browser OAuth); headless environments instead add an Authorization: Bearer header with a TRUNK_API_TOKEN org token to the server entry in .mcp.json. To dig into one test's flakiness history, hand off to fixing-flaky-tests, which covers the search-test and fix-flaky-test tools.

Classification

If multiple signals match, choose the most specific class. For example, prefer codegen drift over lint, migration over typecheck, and snapshot / visual over a generic Playwright test failure.

Base rate for infra and setup failures

"Transient" is a claim about how often the job fails, so do not assert it from one run. A job that dies before its tests run leaves no test-level evidence: no FAILED line, so no fingerprint and no span, so it never appears as a row in broken_tests or in the flaky-tests tool. It is still visible as a job conclusion, which is what the digest's master-failures section groups by, and engineering-analytics-run-failure-logs still returns its failing lines because it reads by run, not by test. Start there, not from a test.

Unlike the span-derived test reads, this one can give you a real rate: the warehouse records every job attempt, greens included, so the denominator is honest. Query 7 in products/engineering_analytics/skills/investigating-ci-failures/references/investigation-queries.md is copy-ready; that skill also owns the wider investigation.

Read the result as:

• Low percentage, recent hours mostly green — transient. Report and move on. For a queued PR, recommend re-enqueueing rather than a code change; posting /trunk merge yourself needs approval, per the Safety rules above.
• Recent hours entirely red — an outage, not a flake. Say so, and stop telling people to retry. Check https://www.githubstatus.com/ before attributing it to this repository; a platform incident makes every other signal a symptom.
• A burst of runs failing together within a couple of minutes — one shared cause, not several bugs. Look for a bad commit many merges inherited, or a GitHub dispatch overflow, which fails runs as startup_failure before they start and so leaves no log at all.
• Steady over days — a standing defect somebody owns. Worth a ticket even though each occurrence looks like noise.

Local reproduction

Run only the narrowest command that exercises the failure. If the command shape is unclear, read .agents/skills/hogli/SKILL.md and hogli <command> --help.

Do NOT run hogli test with no arguments. Do NOT run hogli nuke or hogli dev:reset as a shortcut. Do NOT bypass hooks with --no-verify.

PostHog CI notes

• Most PostHog jobs run on depot-ubuntu-latest or depot-ubuntu-latest-16. Depot runs surface logs through the GitHub Actions UI / gh run view just like standard GitHub-hosted runners, so read them there first.
• When a Depot runner dies mid-job, GitHub keeps no log to read: the job shows no steps and its log blob 404s. Depot's own dashboard keeps that job's page, with the verdict GitHub lost (an OOM kill, a lost runner). Open it in a browser through the chrome-devtools MCP. status.depot.dev covers the case where Depot itself is the outage, and the depot-github-runners skill owns runner troubleshooting beyond triage.
• If a job fails before Checkout completes (no app code ran), classify as infra / runner. Do not propose code fixes.
• PostHog CI frequently parallelizes the same test class across N shards (backend-tests (3/10) style). Reproduce from the specific failing test path, not the shard index.

Report shape

Keep the response short. Include one likely-cause sentence and avoid deeper speculation.

Target: PR #<num> - run <run-id> (<workflow file>)
Failing job:   <job name>
Failing step:  <step name>
Command:       <failing command>
Excerpt:
  <up to 40 lines, trimmed around the failure>

Classification: <class from the table>
Shadow run:     <yes | no>
Likely cause:   <one sentence>
Local repro:    <exact command, or "none">
Next action (needs your approval):
  - <push fix | rerun job | update snapshot | none>

If the classification is infra / runner or a shadow run, say so and stop; do not propose a code change. For infra / runner, include the base rate and whether a retry is warranted.