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Jack Pines

Software Engineer

Welcome to the blog of Jack Pines — musings on software development, AI, and the tech industry.

Debugging False Memories: A Case Study in Systematic Investigation

·8 mins

“I’m pretty sure this worked before.”

Famous last words from a software engineer. I said them with confidence during my MCP dataclass debugging session. I had this vivid memory of calling the function with a dataclass parameter and watching it work in production.

Then I did the git archaeology. It never worked. Not once. The memory was completely false.

Astronaut looking at Earth: “Wait, it’s all false memories?” Astronaut aiming gun at other astronaut: “Always has been”