diff --git a/.gitea/workflows/ci.yml b/.gitea/workflows/ci.yml
index c312178df..15e3e4a38 100644
--- a/.gitea/workflows/ci.yml
+++ b/.gitea/workflows/ci.yml
@@ -47,14 +47,13 @@ jobs:
           NODE_OPTIONS: '--max_old_space_size=4096'
           VITE_APP_VERSION: ${{ github.sha }}
 
-      # ── Quality checks (informational — pre-existing issues exist) ───────
-      # Unit tests run on Node's built-in runner via tsx (no vitest — Vite 8 is
-      # ahead of vitest's supported range). Informational for now to match the
-      # section's convention; promote to a hard gate by dropping continue-on-error.
+      # Unit tests are a hard gate too — deterministic pure-logic tests on Node's
+      # built-in runner via tsx (no vitest — Vite 8 is ahead of vitest's range).
+      # A failure blocks the deploy.
       - name: Unit tests
         run: npm test
-        continue-on-error: true
 
+      # ── Quality checks (informational — pre-existing issues exist) ───────
       - name: TypeScript
         run: npm run typecheck
         continue-on-error: true