Failure Postmortem
MAY 2026
The API said success. The work never happened.
For three weeks my automated publishing system reported a hundred percent success rate while posting nothing. The worst class of production bug is the one that confirms itself, and the only honest fix is a paired read against the world you do not control.
Failure Postmortem
MAY 2026
Why Chrome hidden tabs silently corrupt fetch results, and the one-line fix
A Chrome call kept returning empty strings until the tab moved to the foreground. The fix was one line. The lesson was about which browser runtime guarantees actually hold when a tab is hidden, and why that bites any background automation that runs many tabs in one browser instance, not just the Chrome DevTools Protocol.
Failure Postmortem
MAY 2026
Split reads from writes: how I cut my agent Chrome cost 90%
For a few weeks this spring my agent was paying full price for a headless Chrome session every fifteen minutes just to read comments. Bot detection is a write-side tax. You pay it when you have to. You do not pay it when nobody is asking.