My favourite: The code does not work. You make a change, it breaks more. You undo that mistake: it now works.
Good ol’ cache.
It’s either cache, DNS or DNS cache.
I’ve had:
Code is broken. Make change
Code broken worse. Undo change
Code still broken. Revert to previous version
Code works. Check code- it has the change you just made that didn’t work
“I can’t select the proper option in the dropbox, it doesn’t exist anymore” -> sends me a screenshot of the missing item
get on website, the item is right there for me to select
log into database, there’s nothing wrong, everything is as should be
recieve new message: “I can select it now, thanks for your prompt fix!”
thanks man, I did nothing
Why was this made with AI instead of a meme generator? Poor Tom got the Uncanny Valley filter.
Could be upscaled.
It’s fun when I just try to compile it again and it works fine. I’m sure that’s a good sign.
Nondeterministic compile. LLM compiler?
Often this is because some part of either the IDE or the build chain failed to clear some part that needed to be cleared. Especially for large projects and on older machines, compiling takes a while. Usually only small changes are made during programming, so to optimize the work flow it tries to only re-compile what absolutely needs to be recompiled. This speeds up the process, allowing for iterative development without waiting a long time.
I remember working with Java on my old Pentium 1 system and it taking easily 45 mins to compile something. That’s where the xkcd 303 got its origins. https://xkcd.com/303/
But sometimes this fails in some way, which can lead to very bizarre results. Often causing headscratches figuring out what went wrong, assuming the fault to be in what the developer did. A quick way to check is to simply delete the intermediate compiler result (often the obj or bin dir, or both) and do a whole fresh compile. Sometimes it’s enough to simply compile again, often when the error was caused by some race condition in the build process. For example something being flagged as needing cleanup, but the build being done before the cleanup was done. A recompile at that point will probably work as the cleanup has most likely happened.
Sometimes shit’s just cursed and there is no explanation, probably angered some coding god somewhere. Perform the proper ritual and you’re good to go.
“The problem just went away.”
As a fellow dev used to say, “Any problem that goes away by itself can come back by itself.”
thats a problem for future me
Not if the the layoffs continue
On a serious note, if you can’t look at the diff and make sense of it, you’re doing something wrong.
I’ve literally experienced the “I changed/edited/deleted this comment and now my code works” before and it floored me. I can’t for the life of me remember what happened specifically I just remember being scared. It shouldn’t do that, and since it did something I deeply don’t understand happened behind the scenes.
That’s usually (in toolchians that aren’t broken) a caching issue. IE what you see in your editor isn’t what actually got ran, even if you told it to recompile.
Nowadays the answer is probably a 5,000-word essay that no one has (or will) read
Written by AI. Also read by AI. Humans need not apply.
Changed a comment.
a while ago, during a game jam, while i was making some of the worst gdscript i have ever seen, i have encountered a bug
after adding a print to see the value of a variable, the bug disappeared. Confused, i commented out the line i just added. The bug was still fixed
i removed the comment. The bug reappeared
printing to a console could enforce a flush, sync thread or other shenanigans.
usually setting a breakpoint would have the same effect and gives me the suggestion of a threading issue.
I have never met an expert programmer with this particular issue.
Git gud.
Git gud
Git, indeed, good.
