Comment by softveda
2 days ago
So code that was untested (the code path that failed was never exercised), perhaps there is no test environment, and not even peer reviewed ( it did not have appropriate error handling nor was it feature flag protected.) was pushed to production, what a surprise !!
Continuous Integration/Continuous Disaster
No amount of "whatever" can prevent bugs to reach production
I would not be surprised if the code was AI generated.
I like the faith you have that people weren't making null-pointer mistakes before LLMs.
It did happen before LLMs, but there are well documented process to catch them. Google literally wrote the book on SRE best practices.
error handling is very basic, the only explanation these kind of bad code to get pushed to prod is LLMs and high trust on LLM automation.
they wont admit this publicly anyway, there is too much money invested on LLMs.
There absolutely is a test environment, it was absolutely reviewed and Google has absolutely spent Moon-landing money on testing and in particular static analysis.
Moon landing money on static analysis that failed to identify the existence of a completely untested code path? Or even to shake this out with random data generation?
This is a dumbfounding level of mistake for an organization such as Google.
What makes you think it was completely untested? The condition that triggered the null pointer exception was obviously not tested, but it doesn't mean it didn't have tests or even 100% unit test coverage for the coverage tools.
In addition it looks like the code was not ready for production and the mistake was not gating it behind a feature flag. It didn't go through the normal release process.
2 replies →
ok so what gives then?
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