Pulled on the scan flow in A Wine App — the part where you photograph a restaurant list and it ranks the bottles for your taste. Found something ugly: the engine that’s supposed to choose the final picks ran, decided, and then the screen quietly threw its answer away and re-picked from scratch. Twice.
Three different places were each choosing “top picks,” each with its own rules. The careful one — style diversity, your adventurousness, a real reason per pick — lived in the shared engine and reached no one. A “temporary” adapter, written to bridge old views, had become the actual brain.
Fix: the engine is now the only thing that decides. The app stopped picking and just renders what it’s handed. Three selectors collapsed to one, and I deleted more than I wrote. Tests green.
Dead-but-computed code is worse than missing code. It looks finished and ships wrong.