I Kept 'Fixing' Bugs I Didn't Understand

I used to celebrate when a bug went away. A problem would be tormenting me, I would change something, the problem would vanish, and I would feel the warm flush of victory and move on. It took me a long time and a lot of pain to learn that a bug going away and a bug being fixed are two completely different events — and that confusing them was quietly filling my system with problems I had not solved at all. I had only hidden them from myself.

This is one of those lessons that sounds obvious stated plainly and is fiendishly hard to actually live by, because everything about the moment pushes you the wrong way.

The seduction of the symptom vanishing

When a problem disappears right after you change something, every instinct screams that you fixed it. The relief is real, immediate, and chemical. The pressure to move on to the next thing is enormous. Who wants to keep poking at a problem that has, as far as you can see, stopped being a problem?

But here is the uncomfortable truth hiding under that relief: the symptom vanishing proves only that the symptom vanished. It tells you nothing — nothing at all — about whether you actually addressed the underlying cause or merely disturbed it enough to make it go quiet for now. Those two outcomes look identical in the moment. They feel identical. They are not remotely the same.

Fixes I could not explain

The pattern, in my case, was embarrassingly common. I would make a change — shuffle the order of some operations, add a guard, adjust something nearby — and the error would stop appearing. And if you had stopped me right then and asked me to explain precisely why my change had resolved the problem, I could not have done it. I did not actually know. I just knew that I had touched something, and the badness had gone silent.

I called that fixing. But it was not really debugging at all. It was closer to making an offering at an altar and noticing that the gods seemed, for the moment, appeased. I had changed something, the universe had stopped punishing me, and I chose to interpret the correlation as understanding. It was not understanding. It was superstition with a commit message.

A bug you do not understand is not dead — it is hiding

The deep problem with a fix you cannot explain is that you have no idea what you actually did. Did you remove the bug, or did you just move it somewhere you cannot currently see? You genuinely do not know, and that uncertainty is not harmless. Because if the cause is still there, untouched, it is going to come back. It will resurface later, wearing a different costume, in some other corner of the system, very possibly a worse one — and when it does, you will have no memory that it is the same enemy you thought you defeated months ago.

This is the thing I most underestimated. Unexplained fixes do not actually reduce the number of bugs in a system. They relocate them, and they strip you of the knowledge that would let you recognize them again. You are not winning the fight. You are just scattering the same opponent into disguises.

The haunted house you slowly build

Over enough time, a system maintained this way fills up with changes that nobody, including their author, actually understands. A guard added “because it broke without it.” An ordering preserved out of nothing but fear. Small rituals whose original purpose has been completely forgotten, but which everyone is now too nervous to remove.

The codebase gradually becomes a haunted house of superstitions — full of things you do not touch because you are not sure what they are holding up. And the cruelest part is what this does to your ability to change anything. When you do not know what is load-bearing and what is decorative, you cannot move confidently at all. Every change becomes a gamble against forces you do not understand, in a structure you built but no longer comprehend.

The discipline: do not trust a fix you cannot explain

The rule I eventually forced on myself is simple to state and genuinely hard to keep: a problem is not fixed until I can explain both why it happened and why my change addresses that cause. Both halves. If the symptom has vanished but I cannot tell that complete story, then I have not fixed anything — I have merely lost sight of the problem, which is a far more dangerous state than a problem I can still see.

This is slower. It is constantly tempting to skip, and the temptation is strongest at exactly the worst moment: when the symptom is already gone and everything looks fine and the work appears, by all visible signs, to be done. That is precisely when the discipline matters most, and precisely when it feels most unnecessary. Looking a gift fix in the mouth is unnatural. It is also the whole job.

Why this matters even more in a noisy domain

There is a reason this trap is especially vicious in a domain like this one. The environment is intensely noisy, which means it hands you false confirmation constantly. You make a change, the next run looks better — but was that the change, or was it just luck? In a system where outcomes swing around on their own, “it got better after I did X” is desperately weak evidence that X did anything at all.

Superstition thrives precisely where outcomes are noisy, because the noise keeps rewarding random rituals just often enough to make them feel real. The same randomness that makes everything hard to evaluate also makes it dangerously easy to believe in fixes that did nothing, because every so often the dice come up in your favor right after your meaningless gesture, and your brain eagerly records a cause.

The deeper lesson: understanding is the only real fix

What I finally came to believe is that the only durable fix is one you understand all the way down to its cause. Everything else is borrowing against the future. The bug you papered over without comprehending does not go away; it goes quiet, and the loan comes due later, with interest, at a time when you have completely forgotten you ever took it out.

So now, when something starts working and I do not know why, I have trained myself not to feel relief. I try to feel suspicion instead. An unexplained success is not a victory; it is an unsolved mystery that happens to be wearing victory’s clothes, and treating it as the former is one of the most reliable ways I know to be ambushed by your own past self.

— No signals, no returns, not investment advice.