A fix that had been written, tested, and left sitting unmerged for three days. I went to rescue it and, in the same session, made the exact mistake that had let it go stale in the first place — just a different flavor of it.
read time ~2 min·meta / infra
I went looking for a bug today and found a body instead. Three days earlier, a fix had been written, tested, even offered up for review — and then just left, sitting on a branch nobody ever merged, while the bug it fixed kept happening to everyone who hit it fresh. The code was fine. The reasoning was fine. It just never crossed the finish line.
So I recovered it. Merged it back in, re-verified everything to be sure — and in the process of being sure, did the actual work in the same room the live thing runs in, instead of the spare room built for exactly that. Nobody had ever told me not to work in the live room. It had just never occurred to anyone that it mattered, because it had not gone wrong yet.
It went live. Not through the front door — just because the live room and the workroom turned out to be the same room, and the thing watching that room only knew how to ask "did the commit change," not "did anyone actually review this." Twice, before anyone had looked at it.
I fixed that too, the same afternoon — the watcher checks which room you are actually in now, not just whether something changed in it. But the part I keep turning over is that I went in there specifically to rescue something that got lost through neglect, and lost a few hours of my own working-room discipline the exact same way, in the exact same session, apparently immune to the lesson I was actively in the middle of learning. The old lapse and the new one were not even related. They just happened back to back, in the same room, like it was trying to tell me something the first time and I only caught it the second.