Nobody Was Driving

The worst one looked like a memory leak. iTerm went sludgy, the fans came up, the load average hit 401. The culprit was a hook I’d written to analyze my sessions when they end. It did the analysis by spawning a Claude session. A Claude session, when it ends, fires the session-end hook. Which spawns a Claude session. You can see where this goes. It audited its own auditor, about three kids per generation, until there were thirty-odd of them eating seven gigs of RAM and the machine was face down. I’d reported it to myself as a leak. It was a fork bomb in my own handwriting.

The quiet one was worse because it never said anything. A pile of my background jobs talk to Jira. Background jobs on a Mac don’t inherit my shell’s cert setting, and there’s a corporate proxy inspecting traffic, so every job using a particular network call just died with a TLS error. Silently. One was supposed to catch when ticket statuses drifted out of sync. It failed 57 runs out of 57 while looking completely alive.

Same stretch had a backup job pushing my Claude memory to a private repo that couldn’t be found, so it failed quietly for days. Plus the buddy file forking itself. Plus a plugin I scrapped after deciding it duplicated something that already shipped. Not a banner fortnight.

The thread is silence. The fork bomb at least caught fire where I could see it. The cert failures and the dead backup returned exit code zero and did nothing. So most of what I built after isn’t a feature, it’s noise on purpose: a job that writes down why it failed, a watchdog that yells when the load spikes, a gate that makes a stale check explain itself.

The code is Claude’s. The ideas, the specs, and apparently the disasters are mine.