locale qa agent timed out scanning monorepo with missing strings error

Fix the locale QA agent timing out scanning a monorepo

TL;DR

The QA scan tries to do the whole monorepo in one pass, so shard it by package and raise the timeout per shard. Missing-strings checks are per package anyway, so splitting is natural. Run packages in parallel with a per-shard timeout, then merge the reports.

The error

Locale QA agent timed out after 30 minutes scanning the monorepo
missing-strings check never finished, no report produced

Fix it

Step 1: List the packages to shard by

ls packages/ | head -20

Expected: You see the shard units.

Step 2: Run the QA check per package

node -e "console.log('loop packages, run the missing-strings check per package with its own timeout, collect JSON reports')"

Expected: Each shard gets its own deadline.

Step 3: Raise the per-shard timeout sanely

node -e "console.log('10 minutes per package beats 30 for everything, and a stuck package fails alone')"

Expected: Slow packages fail individually instead of killing the run.

Step 4: Merge the shard reports

node -e "const fs=require('fs'); console.log('concat the per-package JSON reports into one missing-strings report')"

Expected: One report covers the monorepo.

When to use this

• A locale QA agent times out on a monorepo scan
• Missing-strings checks never complete

When NOT to use this

• The scan finishes but is wrong, check the check logic
• One package alone times out, that package has the problem

Tool and version compatibility

• Any monorepo layout with per-package sources
• Missing-strings checks that read per-package catalogs

Variant phrasings

timeouts only in CI

CI runners are slower. Shard there too, or raise CI timeouts to match local.

one giant package dominates

Shard that package by folder. Sharding is recursive, apply it where the time goes.

Why it happens

A single timeout for a whole monorepo assumes linear scaling, but large repos have superlinear slowdowns from cross-package file walks. One stuck package eats the whole budget and no report comes out.

Edge cases

• Shared packages get scanned multiple times, dedupe shared deps across shards
• Report merging must handle duplicate keys across packages deliberately
• Cache per-shard results, unchanged packages skip on the next run

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_aG2jPCkxJKoddHrkN8Xpow