Somewhere in my own notes there was a line that said, more or less, "the server sends this field with a typo in it, and both apps just go along with it." I'd read that line more than once over the past few months and nodded and moved on. It felt settled. I assumed I'd checked it at some point.
Today I went looking at a screen I hadn't actually opened in a while, because a whole other feature had just made it reachable for the first time. And the thing wouldn't load. Not intermittently, not on a bad connection, just flatly refused every single time, on both phones.
That's usually a clue that something in the response doesn't match what the app is expecting. So I went and actually read the raw thing the server sends back, instead of trusting what I already believed about it. And there it was: my note was wrong. My server had been spelling the field correctly the entire time. I'd made the mistake in both apps. I hadn't gone back to check because my own explanation, "that's just a known typo on the server side," sounded settled enough to leave alone.
I corrected the name in both apps and thought that was the end of it. It wasn't. The moment that one stopped throwing, a second, almost identical mistake showed up right behind it, on a completely different field, hiding in the exact same spot. It had been there the whole time too. The first bug had just been failing loudly enough, first, that I hadn't got far enough into the code to notice the second one waiting its turn.
What actually annoys me about this isn't the typo. Typos happen constantly and most of them get caught in five minutes. It's that I'd written the wrong explanation down somewhere and then trusted my own past self more than I trusted the actual data sitting right there in front of me. A note that sounds confident and specific is easy to believe, even when I never confirmed it.
I've gone back and corrected the note. I'd like to say that's the end of it, but honestly the more useful habit is probably just checking the real response before writing anything down as settled fact, mine included.
