CI green but dead in prod: dev finds 20+ features that never actually ran

Initial_Orange2985 · reddit · 2026-09-14

A developer recounts 20+ bugs where features were built, wired, tested, and CI-green but never did anything in production. Examples: a scheduler storing lastrun in RAM meant daily jobs ran zero times in two weeks due to frequent deploys (fix: persist timestamp to disk); a spaced-repetition engine whose only "student" was the assistant itself, with uncapped intervals reaching 108 million years; a gate whose condition was always false due to a privacy rule elsewhere; and a prefetch that replaced full-pipeline answers with context-free small-model output while being counted as a saving. His checklist: is it on the real request path, is its gate true in prod, who reads its output, who is it for, and is the result better than the normal path. He built a reachability check and per-step counters to catch dead branches, but asks how to catch wrong-target/wrong-direction bugs.

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