The 3am production bug
A new Play Store version shipped Monday that nobody had reviewed deeply, and Juan found a broken exercise type in production: one kind of exercise showed no input, nothing, unusable. He asked the partner to fix it; the partner spent all day and couldn't. Juan took over and over-complicated it, staying up until 3am redoing every manual change they'd merged, out of fear that more things were broken. The actual bug was small: an exercise was missing a tag. Juan had added that tag, but the partner had pulled Juan's branch before it existed and never re-synced, so the code that needed the tag couldn't find it, and neither could the partner, because you can't search a codebase for something that isn't there. The quieter lesson is about working with the AI: Julia doesn't yet have the habit of reading what the agent is about to do and asking why, which is how you catch it drifting before it writes the wrong thing.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 15:45 (un tipo de ejercicio sin input, no aparece nada, no se puede hacer)
- ↳ video diary @ 19:22 (el bug era un tag faltante; el socio cogió mi rama antes de que yo lo pusiera)
- ↳ video diary @ 17:30 (leer lo que el agente va a hacer y preguntarle por qué)
- ↳ Entry 245-1: Three branches, one Frankenstein (las ramas paralelas cuyo merge semimanual aquí se rompe)
A new version went to the Play Store on Monday, and nobody had reviewed it deeply. Testing it live, Juan found a broken exercise type: one kind of exercise rendered no input at all, nothing appeared, nothing could be done ▸ 15:45. He handed it to the partner as the priority; the partner said he’d found the bug, spent the whole day on it, and couldn’t fix it ▸ 16:23. So Juan took it, and then over-complicated it: fearing that merging their semi-manual changes across branches had broken more than one thing, he stayed up until 3am redoing every change by hand rather than just patching the bug on the live version ▸ 18:59.
no puedes buscar en el código algo que todavía no existe →
The bug itself was tiny. An exercise was missing a tag. Juan had added that tag, but the partner had pulled Juan’s branch a moment before it existed and never re-synced, so the running code required a tag the partner’s copy didn’t have, and he couldn’t find it because it wasn’t there to find ▸ 19:22. You cannot grep for a thing that doesn’t exist; the fix is to notice the code is asking for something absent and let the agent investigate that gap. Which points at the quieter lesson: Julia doesn’t yet have the habit of reading what the agent is about to do and asking why, the move that catches it drifting, “oiga, explíqueme por qué está haciendo esto”, before it writes the wrong line ▸ 17:30. A missing tag and a stale branch cost a night; a habit of reading along would have cost a minute…
// continued in
no entry has continued this idea yet: the arc is still open