There is a category of bug that is worse than a crash.
A crash is loud. It stops execution. It produces an error. It tells you something went wrong and roughly where. You can find it, fix it, and move on.
State drift is silent. Execution continues. Logs look clean. Individual nodes succeed. Payloads validate. And yet the system becomes progressively, subtly, semantically wrong producing outputs that are structurally correct but meaningfully broken.
This is what happens when parallel execution systems lose control of shared state. And once you've experienced it at scale, it changes how you think about building distributed systems entirely.
What State Drift Actually Is
