# Context — A throwaway test run rewrote our live database

A flowingkhaos fix · monitoring · updated 17 Oct 2026
Source: https://flowingkhaos.com/fixes/worktree-run-migrated-production-database/context

Archon is our build runner. Given a feature brief it plans, implements and validates in a loop we call prp-piv. Each run works in a worktree so two runs never touch the same files, and each run ends in a validate script: type check, tests, and for the CMS, a migration dry-run against a database.

The CMS is Payload on Postgres. Its migrations are the usual kind: a numbered file per schema change, a table that records which have run. Running them against the wrong database is not loud. It succeeds.

Local development reads the database URL from the repo's root `.env` and from `apps/cms/.env.local`. Both are ignored by git, so they never ship. But a run's agents can read the main checkout, and a gate that needs a database will find one there. One old gate even asserts that `apps/cms/.env.local` does not exist in the worktree: an agent had copied it in.

The runner was the obvious suspect because it is the thing that launches the gate. We spent the first diagnosis on it.