On 2026-08-25 a deploy job ran with an empty IMAGE_TAG, wrote
`image: localhost:5000/gitea-mcp:` into the infra repo and pushed it.
That is invalid YAML, so Flux failed the ENTIRE apps Kustomization --
every app stopped reconciling for about an hour, including three
unrelated deploys queued behind it.
This job's existing check could not catch it. It greps for
`image: <repo>:${IMAGE_TAG}` after the sed, and with IMAGE_TAG empty that
pattern matches the corrupted line itself, so the verification passes
because of the bug rather than despite it.
Asserting the input up front is the fix: an empty tag now fails the job
before anything is written, let alone committed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011PL5XcG68SvQqz3vGVbWbf