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The bug that taught me to read the docs

Posted on:March 5, 2025 at 02:30 PM

I once burned most of a day on a bug that felt like a framework betrayal. Symptoms only showed up in production. Local looked perfect. Logs were noisy but unhelpful. I rewrote a hook, then a data layer, then blamed the CDN.

The fix was a single line in the official docs, in a section I had skimmed because the heading looked boring.

The behavior was exactly what the docs described: a default I had assumed was universal was only true in development. Production did the stricter, spec-correct thing. I had been “debugging” my own confirmation bias.

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What I do differently now

Before I refactor or rip out a dependency, I open the docs for the failing path and search for the error string or the API name. If the framework authors already named the edge case, I want to see that paragraph first—not after I have painted myself into a corner.

The bug was embarrassing. The habit stuck.