Yesterday was the day I stopped trusting my own documentation.
It started as a build day and stayed one — roughly 25k lines across a dozen repos — but the theme that ran through nearly all of it was the same: I went looking for claims in READMEs and design docs, checked them against running code instead of against other documents, and found a startling number that were confidently wrong rather than merely stale. The Tenant-migration tooling docs described a worker action that has never existed and an auth header appearing in exactly one place in the repo — the sentence claiming it. maracaibo-charts’ README described a hole metric that isn’t the one shipped. maracaibo-trip-replay’s numbers all came from a script that lived only in a temp directory macOS wipes on reboot. Same story in cityheatmap: every street name on the map traced back to two files in /tmp that no script produced. Second time in one day, judging by the commit body.
The plotter work was the opposite of an audit — pure forward motion. maracaibo-plotter got nine days of numbered decisions in one sitting: tuning constants measured against the real boat rather than guessed, a man-overboard button, a standalone build, and a chart arriving over the LAN. One finding was that a real NMEA source had been broadcasting on the boat’s network the whole time. “Blocked” had been the wrong word; it was just untested.
Two honest direction changes. The world chart grind in maracaibo-charts got reordered value-first — Denmark next instead of last, because building smallest-first was optimising the wrong thing. And in harbor-vessel-tracking, a hand-drawing job for a harbour outline evaporated once I asked our own purchased chart instead of an aerial photo.
Also touched: Foreman (a queue several foremen can pull from without colliding), Maracaibo, Maracaibo dashboard, maracaibo-helm, marine-route-planning, Havnetryk, The Cloudy Brain, and the ideas repo, where the ledgers finally caught up to reality across a dozen projects.
Tonight: the docs describe what exists, and the plotter is a real thing you can put a chart on.