name: podcaster-handoff-validation description: Validate Podcaster handoff without exposing secrets or publishing content domain: quality, pipeline-validation, secret-handling confidence: medium

#source: Fry Podcaster handoff QA validation

#Pattern

• Gate post-publish handoffs on the exact eligible mode (run_mode == "normal") and on successful upstream publish/deploy jobs; broad negative filters are easy to miss when new rerun modes are added.
• Keep downstream handoff failures non-blocking and outside the article publication success criteria; warn and preserve the completed publish.
• Validate the publish manifest immediately before handoff so no-AI, stale, failed, or unpromoted candidates cannot leak into downstream generation.
• Validate client behavior locally with a localhost mock server and a placeholder API key.
• Check secret availability by presence only; never print or retrieve secret values.
• Use project-local scratch space via TMPDIR=$PWD/.copilot/local-tmp so existing tests that call tempfile do not write outside the repo.
• Treat workflow dry-run support as valid only if the Podcaster job actually runs and sends dry_run: true without publishing or mutating production content.

#Anti-patterns

• Dispatching a normal publish workflow solely to test a downstream handoff.
• Reading .env or printing configured secret values for validation.
• Assuming a pipeline dry-run validates handoff when the handoff job is skipped by workflow conditions.