Tradition says December is for highlight reels. This is a changelog; we do patch notes. Here are the bugs I actually shipped in 2025, rated by how long they survived and how loudly they were discovered.
Selected incidents
The Payroll Rounding Incident (fixed in 34 minutes). A mapping between time entries and payroll rounded in the employees' favor. I want to be clear that no employee reported this bug. Detection: my own reconciliation job, which exists because I don't trust anything I build until it's watched.
The Overly Honest Chatbot (fixed same day). An early ColeAI prompt, asked "what's Cole's biggest weakness," answered with what I can only describe as accurate. The review gate exists for writes; apparently it also needed to exist for candor.
The 2 A.M. Scene (fixed after one very confusing night). My smart-home platform decided "movie night" was an appropriate response to a motion event at 2:11 a.m. The lights dimmed. The TV woke. I aged.
The Quote That Grew (caught in review). An AI-drafted estimate confidently included a line item for a service we don't offer. The human at the gate laughed, deleted it, and that laugh is the entire business case for human review.
Why publish this
Because every vendor deck you'll see in January is a list of things that went right, and you should not trust anyone who ships software and has no list of things that went wrong. Bugs aren't the shame. Undetected bugs are. Every incident above was caught by instrumentation, reconciliation, or a human gate — the boring trio that turns mistakes into patch notes instead of lawsuits.
Merry Christmas. May your logs be verbose and your rollbacks unnecessary.