A sanitation route job finds its CSV on a technician's laptop via a relative path but fails on the municipal CI agent with a missing-file runtime error. What should the team recognize?

A sanitation route job that finds its CSV through a relative path on a technician’s laptop but fails on the municipal CI agent with a missing-file runtime error is most likely encountering environment and working-directory differences. Relative paths resolve from the process’s current working directory and the agent’s checkout layout, which may differ from the laptop’s ad-hoc folder structure. The code worked locally because the expected relative layout happened to exist there. Incrementing semantic versioning MAJOR whenever a CSV moves confuses packaging version policy with path portability; a version change does not fix a missing file. The claim that syntax parsers always reject relative paths on every operating system is incorrect: relative paths are valid, and the failure occurs at runtime when the target cannot be found. A detached HEAD state does not make Git resolve relative CSV paths against a remote registry URL; that claim mixes unrelated Git and path-resolution concepts. Exam caveat: the fix may be to check the CSV into the repository at a known path, generate it in an earlier CI step, or use an absolute path rooted at the workspace checkout variable, such as GITHUB_WORKSPACE or CI_PROJECT_DIR. A laptop home-directory absolute path is no more portable. Binary or privacy-sensitive sanitation data may instead belong in an artifact store, with an explicit download step. Practical check: print the current working directory and resolved CSV path in CI logs, align the job with the agent’s workspace layout, rerun the pipeline until the file opens, and add a CI assertion that fails fast when the expected input artifact is missing.