RCA-2026-04-11-001: Analysis
Root Cause
5 Whys Analysis
| Why # | Question and Answer |
|---|---|
1 |
Why did the Antora build hang? |
2 |
Why were 5,000 pages added to domus-captures? |
3 |
Why wasn’t the build tested before committing 5,000 files? |
4 |
Why was build output being filtered instead of read? |
5 |
Why were pre-existing errors tolerated for hours? |
Root Cause Statement
|
Antora cannot process ~5,000 pages in a single component within Cloudflare’s 20-minute build limit or reasonable local memory constraints. The files should have been generated into a dedicated spoke repo (domus-literature) from the start, and the build should have been tested before committing. |
Contributing Factors
| Factor | Description | Preventable? |
|---|---|---|
No build test before commit |
6,795 files committed and pushed without running |
Yes |
Grepped build output |
|
Yes |
Amend after push |
|
Yes |
Duplicate agent work |
Background agent and main conversation both fixed the same files, creating duplicate commits |
Yes |
Normalized error-blindness |
100+ pre-existing xref errors were visible in every build but ignored for hours |
Yes |
No Antora page limit awareness |
No documented threshold for how many pages a single Antora component can handle |
Partially — now documented |
Cloudflare free tier limit |
20-minute build timeout is a hard constraint not previously tested against |
No — external constraint |
Impact
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
Severity |
P2 — Build broken, deployment blocked |
Duration |
~4 hours |
Systems Affected |
domus-captures build (local + Cloudflare), git branch integrity |
Commits Requiring Recovery |
3 (1 amend, 1 duplicate, 1 rebase) |
Files Touched in Recovery |
110+ (xref fixes) + 4,899 (scripture removal) + 13 (attribute escapes) |
Data Loss |
None — scripture content preserved in git history and Principia source |