I ship a Windows installer that sets up Claude Code / Codex CLI / ClawX / Hermes for non-technical users in China. Over ~14 months of real customer machines I collected a pile of failure modes that basically never show up on a developer's laptop, and open-sourced them as a case library.
A few that cost me the most hours:
- Self-update silently did nothing on any machine whose install path contained Chinese characters. The updater wrote a .bat in UTF-8; cmd.exe parses it as GBK. No error, no log, exit code useless (a self-deleting .bat always returns 1).
- An app-wide crash from a one-line helper: tail() sliced a String by byte offset, hit a multi-byte character, panicked — and the release profile is panic=abort, so the whole GUI vanished with no dialog.
- "The model is listed in /v1/models" is not the same as "the model answers". Two model ids that enumerated fine returned 0/4 and 503 respectively.
- taskkill /IM Claude.exe, intended to close the Claude desktop app, also kills every Claude Code CLI session on the box — same image name.
Repo (MIT, no telemetry, nothing to install): https://github.com/dongsheng123132/u-rescue
The product itself is closed-source and Windows-only, so I'm not pitching it here — the cases are the useful part. Corrections welcome, especially if you've hit the GBK/UTF-8 one on a different toolchain.
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