Checklist · Free

Catch the 16 bugs that never throw

Run this checklist every cycle and catch the 16 silent failures your AI agent ships — swallowed catches, fail-open gates, speculative writes — before they reach production.

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0 silent failures

Patterns

Signal + why-it-hides

Per pattern

Free — no email, no payment

Price

How it works

audit — running

16 production silent-…

Signal + why-it-hides…

Verify-against-live-d…

Works on any language…

Scoreverified ✓

0 silent failures

Patterns

Run the audit

Spot the gaps

Fix with the exact step

Verify & ship

How it actually works

Exactly what it does — and when.

1For a swallowed catch in a Node.js Express handler → it names the signal (empty catch with next() never called) and explains why it hides from integration tests that assert status codes but don't check downstream side effects.

2For a fail-open auth gate using JWT verification → it points to the specific pattern where verify() returns true on decode errors, and explains why mocking the auth provider in tests never exercises the malformed-token branch.

3For speculative writes in a Python Celery task → it flags instances where DB commits happen before external API confirmation, and explains why async test runners with eager mode mask the race condition entirely.

4For the verify-against-live-data discipline → it prescribes running each fix against a production trace sample in JSONL format, confirming the silent path now either throws or logs with a structured correlation ID.

In practice · Pre-Merge Silent-Failure Sweep

A backend engineer downloads the checklist before merging a new payment-retry service written in Go. She scans for all 16 patterns, finds two: a goroutine error channel that's never read and a feature flag that defaults to enabled on parse failure. She fixes both, pushes the branch, and the two silent paths now surface as logged errors with retry IDs instead of disappearing.

Use it to…

Real ways people put Silent-Failure Checklist to work.

Pre-merge agent code review

Run the 16-pattern checklist on AI-generated changes before merge to catch fail-open gates and swallowed catches your tests won't surface.

Every-cycle shipping gate

Walk the checklist each release with verify-against-live-data discipline to catch what logs never show before you ship.

Silent-bug post-mortem

When production breaks but nothing threw, use the signal + why-it-hides entries to pinpoint which silent-failure pattern your agent introduced.

This product

Catching issues by accident

Detection

Every silent failure, named

You find out after it breaks

Fix

The exact step for each

Google + guesswork

Repeatable

Run it every cycle

Ad-hoc, inconsistent

Cost

Free / once, yours forever

An incident in production

The shift it creates

Without it

Silent failures you can't see
Finding out after it breaks
No repeatable QA pass

→

With it

Name and spot swallowed catches, fail-open gates, and speculative writes before they reach production
For each pattern, get the exact signal to look for and why it hides when tests pass and logs stay clean
Apply verify-against-live-data discipline on any language or codebase, every shipping cycle

What's inside

16 production silent-failure patterns

Signal + why-it-hides for each

Verify-against-live-data discipline

Works on any language or codebase

Instant download — no email, no payment

Who it's for

Developers shipping AI agent–written code

Agents commit silent failures that pass tests and never throw

Reviewers of agent-generated PRs

Each pattern names the signal to look for when behavior breaks but logs stay clean

Teams debugging production after green tests

Targets the bugs that hide from tests and only surface against live data

Questions, answered

✓ Free · no email✓ Yours to own✓ Use on every project✓ Built to ship results