#debugging

I was in bed, on my phone, watching my AI drive a fake phone, to fix the app I was talking to it through.

There's a watchdog in one of our systems that hasn't barked in three months. For years before that, it barked every few weeks, and nothing was ever wrong.

All I wanted was to get one project running on my laptop. Seven weeks later I'd written a tool whose only job was to find the trapdoors, and I was running the same code in five copies at once just to keep the fights straight.

The premise was easy. An API call was supposed to return orders for one branch — and it kept handing back orders it had no business showing. I had the code. The code looked fine.

An app I'd used for years launched perfectly on my new Mac — three copies of it at once, all alive in Activity Monitor — and not one of them showed its little bat icon in the menu bar.