I spent $200 in two hours and the bug was still there at the end of it.
One bug. Two hours. Two hundred dollars.
One bug. Not a feature, not a refactor, one bug. There’s a report page in my product with three columns. Table of contents on the left, the actual content in the middle, a little quick-nav thing on the right. You click an entry in the table of contents and the middle column is supposed to scroll to that section. It didn’t. That’s it. That’s the whole bug. If you’ve ever fought with sticky headers and nested scroll containers and the exact math scrollIntoView does versus what you wanted it to do, you know it’s fiddly, but it’s not some exotic thing.
I watched Opus 4.6 propose a fix (it was before 4.7, which was worse). It didn’t look at anything first, it just decided what was probably wrong and wrote the change. The change ran, which cost actual money, and it didn’t work. So it went “okay” and tried the next idea. Wrote it, ran it, didn’t work. Next one.
It never stopped to actually figure out the cause. It just kept producing. And the meter kept going the whole time. I eventually killed the session and started clean, but only after my partner called and yelled at me. The restart has its own special feeling too, paying two hundred bucks to end up exactly where you started.
