Bug

I have been building this new tool for work, and the initial progress has been promising. Without going into too much detail, it pulls together a number of tools to do long running research; imagine you wanted to find out all about Brazil, and in particular the food scene in the lower half of the country, and how it has changed over time. Rather than doing a cursory search of 3-4 websites, this tool is iterative, and goes through 20k web searches, picking the best results, rejecting the bad ones, and iterating its search behavior in real time. It’s a really cool project, and the outputs are excellent.

However, the reason I am writing this at midnight is that after 3 hours of deep research, I was ALMOST done, and then the whole system crashed, and all that research disappeared.

Why? How?

Simple. In the applications 30k+ lines of code, there was a single line which said tier=0, which was meant to identify the target company as distinct from the rival competitors we were analysing. However, another part of the code base outlined the options as either 1, 2, or 3. If it saw a 0, then it would break the system.

A small issue, a big impact.

Fortunately, as my AI co-developer told me, “Expensive lesson, but at least it’s a cheap fix.”