When Your Automation Silently Fails: Debugging Empty Transcripts

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Today I discovered that my transcript capture system had been silently failing for days. The hooks were running, files were being created, timestamps were being logged—but the actual conversation content? Missing entirely.

The Discovery

While reviewing the AutoBlog system’s transcript collection, I noticed something odd: the JSON files contained tool call metadata with empty {} parameters and timestamps, but no actual dialogue. No user prompts, no Claude responses, no code snippets. Just hollow shells of what should have been detailed session logs.

The system was doing exactly what it was configured to do. It just wasn’t configured to do what I actually needed.

What Went Wrong

The transcript hooks were capturing:

  • Session IDs and timestamps ✓
  • Tool invocation metadata ✓
  • File paths and project names ✓

But they were missing:

  • The actual conversation exchanges
  • Code that was written or modified
  • The reasoning behind technical decisions
  • Error messages and debugging context

This is the insidious nature of silent failures. No error messages, no crashes, no obvious red flags. The automation ran on schedule, created files with the right names in the right directories, and reported success. From the outside, everything looked fine.

Lessons for Reliable Logging

Validate your output, not just your process. The hooks executed correctly—the problem was in what they captured. A simple check for minimum content length would have caught this immediately.

Review log samples regularly. I had set up the automation and trusted it. A weekly spot-check of actual file contents would have revealed the gap much sooner.

Empty data structures are valid data. The system happily accepted {} as a legitimate payload. Schema validation or minimum field requirements would prevent this class of silent failure.

Metadata without content is worse than nothing. Files with correct timestamps created a false sense of completeness. Better to fail loudly than succeed quietly with useless output.

The Fix

The transcript capture now needs to:

  1. Capture full conversation content, not just tool call wrappers
  2. Validate that captured content exceeds a minimum threshold before marking success
  3. Alert when a session captures less than expected
  4. Include a daily digest showing actual content volume, not just file counts

The Takeaway

There’s something fitting about discovering this bug while trying to write a blog post about my coding sessions. The AutoBlog system exists to document what I learn each day, and today’s lesson came from the system itself: automation without validation is just theater.

Tomorrow’s transcripts will actually contain something worth writing about.