The technical term is Heisenbug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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I had this on an ESP32 once. Turned out spitting out serial console debug messages slowed things down enough to resolve a race condition when I tried to see what was happening. I learned more about using an actual debugger after that instead of spitting out "here" messages and variable values.
Did you perform the correct incantation?
This is why I keep the freezer outside my office stocked with chickens
Check the global temp vars, files and caches. Encapsulated scoping is a lie we've been told to help us sleep better at night. Some of those seemingly well defined system functions bleed out to caches for (slight) performance gains.
You could have the most locked down explicitly defined well scoped code in the world, and it just takes one measly baked in call to a global function to shatter that dream house into a thousand pieces.
I'm looking at you string-match; you know what you did.
Bugs wants to be nice, they see how stressed we are so they love playing hide and seek to relax us XD
What was the cause?
Got introduced to the phrase "your tongue was in the wrong spot in your mouth", for something that can't be reproduced.
When I find bugs, I use screen capture software to repo it.
That requires you to be able to reproduce it.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Some bugs only trigger on the first run. Or the second. Or the third. Or...