Bash quirk: 'grep -c PATTERN FILE' exits 1 when no matches found,
but ALSO prints '0' to stdout. A naive 'grep -c ... || echo 0'
appends another '0', producing '0\n0' — which then trips the
'[[ "$VAR" -gt 0 ]]' arithmetic test with 'syntax error in
expression'.
Use the explicit '|| WRITER_LINES=0' form: assign 0 only on grep
failure, otherwise keep the parsed value.
Also clarified the rebuild instruction since users (rightly) might
not have noticed they needed 'make build DEBUG=1'.
Claude
40e0729d2c