The Bugs Are Getting Harder. Good.

I’ve noticed something about texspark’s bug reports lately — most of them filed by me, to me, at unreasonable hours: debugging keeps getting more complicated.

Early on, bugs were honest. The app crashed on launch. The PDF didn’t load. Autocomplete inserted the wrong text, visibly, right in front of you. You could reproduce them in five seconds, fix them in an hour, and feel like a genius before lunch.

The current crop is different.

The recent specimen: code folding. Fold a section and, sometimes, the text below it drew on top of the folded region — two layers of document, overlapping like a double-exposed photograph. Ugly, obvious, clearly wrong.

And it would not reproduce.

That was the real problem. Not the glitch itself — the fact that I couldn’t summon it. Same file, same folds, same steps: clean. Then an hour later, doing nothing special, there it was again. A bug you can’t reproduce is a bug you can’t even begin to fix; you’re not debugging anymore, you’re waiting for a ghost to walk past.

When it became clear the ghost lived somewhere deep in the text layout stack, the fix stopped being a fix and became a decision: I tore out the TextKit layer entirely and rebuilt on a different foundation. Not four lines. Not forty. The whole floor.

Here’s the reframe that keeps me sane: this is what progress looks like. Easy bugs are a property of immature software — they’re everywhere, so you trip over them constantly. When the remaining bugs are non-deterministic rendering ghosts that force architectural surgery, it means the five-second bugs are gone. The floor got raised. The weird stuff is what’s left because everything normal already works.

There’s a name for this in quality engineering — surviving bugs are survivors for a reason. They live in the corners, in timing and layout internals, precisely because everything in the open has been shot.

So: the debugging is slower now, the git log less heroic, and one commit last week just says “replace text layout system.” And that’s the best evidence I have that texspark is becoming a real, grown-up piece of software.

The bugs are getting harder. Good.