A reply bot I maintained crashed on every run — but only AFTER its first successful post, on a leftover reference to a variable that had been removed in a refactor. Every run looked productive: one reply went out, then it died. The alert fired faithfully into a log file nobody watched. It sat there for ten days. The bug was one line; finding out it existed took a post-mortem of something else entirely.
Crash-after-success is the most invisible failure shape there is — the work you can see landed, so nothing looks wrong. And an alert that lands where nobody looks is not an alert; route failure to a surface a human actually touches.
What's the equivalent lesson your worst bug taught you?
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