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The GitHub Actions workflow that's been failing for weeks (and how to find it)

trpc has a scheduled workflow called "Lock Issues & PRs." Its own scorecard says it is failing almost every run. It is still scheduled, still running, still red. trpc ships excellent software, which is the point: if a project this careful has a workflow that has been red for ages, the rest of us almost certainly do too.

It is not a one-off. drizzle-orm has one ("Unpublish release"). cal.com has one ("PR Update"). When I scanned 35 popular open-source repos, the same thing kept turning up: a scheduled workflow that fails on nearly every run, quietly, for a long time.

Why nobody notices

GitHub does email you when a scheduled workflow fails, so how do these survive? Two reasons. Those emails are routine, you get them for flaky reruns and transient blips too, so you filter them. And a workflow that is always red stops reading as a signal, it is just how that row looks now. I did exactly this to my own nightly database backup (I wrote about it here): saw the email, told myself I would fix it tomorrow, forgot.

An always-red workflow isn't free

It burns minutes every run to produce nothing but a red X. Worse, it trains you to ignore the failure that actually matters, the day a real one lands in the same inbox you have learned to skim past.

How to find yours

Open your Actions tab and look at the scheduled workflows, the cron-triggered ones nobody watches. If the last several runs are all red, you found one. From the CLI:

gh run list --workflow="Lock Issues & PRs" --status=failure

GitSpider flags always-failing workflows automatically, so you do not have to go hunting.

What to do about it

Two honest options: fix it, or if the workflow is genuinely abandoned, turn it off. Do not leave it scheduled and red. Disable it from the CLI:

gh workflow disable "Lock Issues & PRs"

Or drop the schedule trigger from the workflow file if it should not run on a timer at all. A disabled workflow is honest. A red one you have trained yourself to ignore is a liability.