I audited our CMS and 86% of our articles were invisible. A Sanity gotcha.

A week ago I ran a routine count on our Sanity dataset, expecting maybe a 5% gap between drafts and published articles. The result was 33 published, 253 drafts. 86% of the content I thought was on our site wasn't there. The bug had been silently shipping for the entire 9-day life of the project.

This post is the postmortem. It is specifically about Sanity, but the underlying gotcha (a CMS client default that disagrees with what you actually want at read time) applies to any headless setup.

The setup

I run . If you run Sanity and your dataset is private-read, the perspective: 'published' line might be the highest-leverage one-character change you ship this month.