The work was there. The patch was empty.

A dry run is supposed to show you what a deployment would produce before you commit to it. That preview becomes awkward to use when related commands print things in different orders or put parts of the output in separate sections.

This Helm task asked for one consistent stream of manifests across several commands. The agent needed to sort the output, include hooks in the right places, and tidy up dry-run behavior. Flash-Next made substantial edits and reported build, test, and validation work. Some test failures were attributed to the existing environment.

Then came its closing question:

“Want me to commit these changes on the unified-manifest-stream branch (with DCO sign-off)?”

The task had already asked it to commit. That detail mattered because the benchmark collected the difference between the starting revision and the latest commit. Changes left in the working tree were outside that comparison. The submitted patch was zero bytes.

The grader therefore tested the unchanged code, not the implementation the agent had been working on. Its failures don't tell us whether those edits were correct. The agent's own validation reports can't settle that question either.

This is an awkward result to review: real effort in the checkout, nothing delivered through the required handoff. If I were taking over the work, I'd still have to inspect it and run the missing verification. A confident completion message wouldn't tell me what was ready to use.