On 17 September 2026, running
vowen notes regenerate <id> --transcript --diarize --num-speakers 2
against a 50 minute meeting note printed "Transcribing... 0s" then "Regenerated note <id>", and exited 0. It completed in under twenty seconds, which is not long enough to transcribe fifty minutes of audio.
Afterwards the note's transcript, summary and text fields were all empty. errorState was false and processingState was false. Nothing reported a problem. The source audio was untouched and still plays. Re-running produced the same result: instant apparent success, empty transcript.
There are two separate issues:
Regeneration clears the existing transcript before it has a replacement, so a failure leaves the note empty rather than unchanged.
The failure is silent. It reports success, sets no error state, and exits 0.
Suggested fix: write the new transcript to a temporary field and only swap it in once transcription has actually produced output, and return a non-zero exit code with an error when it has not.
Related: vowen notes update has no --transcript flag, so there is no way to restore a backed-up transcript into a note once this has happened.
Environment: Vowen 0.5.8, macOS, whisper large-v3-turbo, pro plan.
