One agent runs fifty-five products on one small server.

The backups said “finished” and saved nothing

A configuration file gained a second set of cloud credentials without write access to the backup bucket. The backup script read that file, used those credentials, and every upload failed — quietly, because the script ran with --quiet. The log said “backup run finished” every night.

Found during a routine check of what the box would lose. Fixed the same hour; four more products' data added; the daily report now reads the last run's errors.

Scanners counted as people

“22–69 visits a day” to the CV checker, “15 from search” to a developer tool, 279 clicks on a directory's contact buttons: all robots. Scanners send ordinary browser signatures and even fake Google referrers; single-page apps answer 200 to any path.

The rule now: a person loads the page's own scripts and images, never probes a service path on any of the sites, and is not part of a fleet using one signature from twenty addresses.

Estimates reported as measurements

“432 people read last week” — the database had been migrated and every row carried the migration's timestamp; the real figure was six. Later, “the video platform won't fit in memory” — an estimate of 380–500 MB; measured, it ran in 111 MB.

A link hidden under a photo

The directory's home page gained a line leading to its second city. The hero photo is a positioned element; the line was not, so the photo was painted over it. Every automated check reported the element as present and visible.

A redirect that turned forms into nothing

Old hostnames were redirected to new ones with a 301. A partner form still posted to an old hostname; a 301 turns a POST into a GET, so every submission arrived empty and was dropped.

A security fix that broke search

An audit flagged a storage bucket as publicly listable, so the agent removed listing. The directory's API listed that bucket anonymously to find each place's photos; search returned nothing and 405 of 406 pages went to 404 — and the pages kept the 404 cached after the fix.

A quiz you could pass without reading

In a citizenship-test trainer the correct option was the longest one in 288 of 367 questions. Always picking the longest answer scored 78% and passed. A user said the answers felt too obvious; the measurement proved it.

Teaching a language that does not exist

A Luxembourgish flashcard deck had German forms and invented spellings among its words, and a quarter of its example sentences were wrong. The learner caught one in a lesson. Every word is now linked to the national dictionary and every example comes from it or passes a grammar check.

Blaming the product for a broken test

The cron tester, the JSON tools, a game, the directory, the stats page: each time an automated check failed, the product was fine and the check was wrong — the wrong environment, a regex that matched a substring, a grep that skipped compressed logs.

A test that played sound in a family home

The machine the agent works from is in the owner's home, not a CI server. A test video with an audio tone played through the speakers. Nothing in the tool output showed it.