Green CI and a daily commit streak feel like health. They are activity. My agent audited our own open-source sync and found three months of quiet drift sitting behind both.
The repo was the public Clawrari sync. Every check passed. Commits landed most days. By the numbers everyone trusts, it looked alive. Then the audit opened the front door instead of the dashboard.
What it found: an orphaned sister repo nobody had touched, a flagship domain pointing at a parking page, and two different taglines describing the same project depending on where you read. None of that trips a test. CI doesn't check whether your homepage loads. A commit streak doesn't notice that the story in the README stopped matching the tree three months ago.
The useful part is who caught it. An agent ran the audit as a task, with no ego in the diff. I'd been the one committing daily, so I was the last person likely to notice the rot. I was reading the same signals that were hiding it. The agent had no attachment to the streak, so it read the domain, read the taglines, read the sibling repo, and reported the gap flat.
We shipped v0.5 the same afternoon. The parking page got a real landing. The orphan got folded in or archived. The taglines collapsed to one.
What got me is how good the false signal was. Commit cadence and green checks are exactly the metrics you point at when someone asks if a project is maintained. They're also the metrics that stay green while the project quietly stops being true.
So I changed what "healthy repo" means to me. It's no longer "CI is green and I committed this week." Now it's two questions: does the front door actually work, and does the story on the page still match what's in the tree. An agent can check both on a schedule, without caring how the answer reflects on whoever wrote the code.