upload_folder only ever added, so a Delta overwrite left the previous generation's commits and parts in place and readers unioned them. delete_patterns on data/pit/** makes an overwrite actually overwrite.
Drop the stale Delta commits and the parquet parts no commit refers to
The PIT log held v0 (Overwrite, 2026-10-23, 177732 rows) followed by v1 and v2 from 2026-08-27 (178755 rows), left behind because publish only ever adds files. A reader unioned two unrelated generations into 356487 rows, and the append guard refused every run. Version 0 alone is coherent; 41 of the 43 parquet parts belonged to no commit at all. Archived first at ZipLime/congress-trading-pit-archive.
The 7500-document cap was calibrated to the House portal at 0.7 docs/s. Today it served 0.33, so the annual backlog alone ran past the job's five-hour timeout and the run published nothing -- the exact failure the cap exists to prevent. A deadline holds that invariant whatever the portal's speed: the tail of the queue is left unfetched and unmarked, so the next run picks it up.
Download the snapshot into the work dir the recipe actually reads
The job sets CONGRESS_WORK_DIR=/tmp/congress, and ensure_workspace assigned its own temp dir with setdefault, so the configured value won. data/** was downloaded to one directory and every step read another, empty one: the filings index was rebuilt from scratch each run and the append-only PIT Delta was recreated instead of appended. It went unnoticed while both portals answered; with the Senate behind Akamai the Senate half simply vanished from the bundle and the shrink guard stopped publication.
Let an optional step fail without taking the whole refresh with it
The Senate eFD portal now answers the agreement POST with an Akamai 403, so step_10_senate_index raises. run_step only caught SystemExit, so the exception escaped the optional flag and killed the refresh after the House index had already been built: 49025 filings collected and thrown away, twice. An optional step that raises is now logged and skipped, and the skipped steps are named at the end so a half-updated bundle does not pass unnoticed.
