The last post ended on that late night: the report was all green, I opened the browser, and the game was dead. Students couldn't get in, the start button did nothing, and the questions the teacher picked never made it to the server.
My first reaction was every engineer's reaction. These are a few bugs, fix them one at a time, move on. But something kept nagging at me. How does an all-green pipeline produce a thing nobody can play? If this round was just bad luck, what about the next one? Rather than patch them one by one, I wanted to know the real question underneath: what is it, exactly, that lets an all-green report and a dead build be true at the same time?
So I decided not to put my head down and fix it. I handed the whole package to Fable 5 — the code, the all-green report, the spec — and said one thing: tell me what's broken. I deliberately gave it none of my guesses. I didn't even say "I think the selected questions aren't reaching the server," because I didn't want it to nod along with my diagnosis. I wanted its own eyes. That decision — not framing the reviewer — turned out to be the most valuable move of the whole thing.
Three symptoms, one blind spot
Fable's first finding stopped me cold. Those three symptoms weren't three bugs. They were one blind spot, falling on three different edges.
