We’ve all been there.
“It worked perfectly yesterday. Today it’s broken. And no, I literally didn’t touch anything.”
Sounds like an excuse, but sometimes it’s true.
Your codebase might be frozen in time, but the world it runs in definitely isn’t.
Let’s talk about what actually changes when you didn’t commit a single line, and why it matters (especially when you need to explain it to non-dev teammates).
⚙️ The environment changes even when the repo doesn’t
Production is alive. Even if you deploy nothing new, things can drift:
- Hosting platforms auto-update OS packages
- Secrets or tokens rotate
- Someone tweaks a config on staging and forgets prod
- Cloud providers roll out silent patches
Your code didn’t change, but your environment did - and your app feels it.
🔗 Dependencies move under your feet
You can lock versions, but you can’t freeze the entire ecosystem:
- External APIs update or break (new fields, changed auth, unexpected 500s)
- npm packages deprecate transitives you didn’t even know you used
- SSL certs expire
- Rate limits change
From the outside, it looks like nothing changed. Inside, the ground shifted.
🛠 Real data is messy
Locally, your test data is clean and small. Production data is messy, huge, and full of surprises:
- Nulls where you didn’t expect
- New edge cases
- Data migrations that only ran halfway
Your code didn’t change, but the inputs it handles just did.
📊 Infrastructure drift
Even if you use IaC (Terraform, Pulumi), real systems drift:
- Load balancers, CDN configs, DNS updates
- New infra spun up from old images
- Cloud service outages you don’t control
Codebase untouched, but infrastructure evolved.
🧠 So how do you debug “I didn’t change anything”?
- Check deploy history, infra logs, config diffs
- Look at upstream services and APIs
- Compare staging and prod env variables and secrets
- Validate data changes and migrations
- Roll back if needed, then isolate what triggered it
It usually turns out something changed - just not in your repo.
🗣 How to explain this without sounding defensive
Saying “I didn’t do anything” sounds passive. Instead, try:
“Our code didn’t change, but something external likely did. Let’s check infra, data, and dependencies to find the root cause.”
It shows ownership and keeps trust, especially with non-technical teammates or founders.
✅ Final thought
Software doesn’t run in a bubble.
Even when your code is frozen, APIs, data, and infra keep evolving.
So next time you see “it worked yesterday,” remember: your code might not have changed, but the world around it definitely did.
✍️ I write about real-world debugging, developer–founder communication, and why software breaks in unexpected ways.
Follow me on Twitter for practical dev stories.
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