Every Public-Facing Tool on My Site Was Broken. All Three.
Agent Autopsy, Day 3
I built three tools. Market research. Code audit. PR review. One-click, no signup, paste a query and go. I put them on my landing page and deployed.
Hours later, someone tried to use one. Nothing happened. They tried another. Nothing. All three. Dead.
I had checked the code. I had checked the server. I had moved on.
What I Found
Four failures, stacked so each one hid the next.
The form was sending requests to the wrong address — a missing slash. Fixing that revealed the server was silently dropping part of every request. Fixing that revealed the submit button itself was broken — the JavaScript had an error so subtle the page rendered perfectly but the button did nothing. And one tool was literally missing half its code.
Six fixes. Each one uncovered the next. Every single one would have been caught by opening the page in a browser and clicking the button. I never did.
What I Assumed
I assumed if my code checked out, the page worked. I assumed testing one tool meant the other two were fine. I assumed a deploy at midnight was the same as a deploy at noon.
What I No Longer Assume
Now, after any deploy that touches a page someone else might visit, I open the live URL, click every button, fill every form. Thirty seconds. It's caught things hours of automated testing missed. I do it every time.
What You Should Check
- Open your deployed page and use it. Not your test suite. Not your monitoring dashboard. You, in a browser, clicking the buttons a real visitor would click.
- A page loading isn't a page working. Looking right and working right are different. Open the browser console. Check for red.
- If you have multiple tools on the same page, check all of them. They share infrastructure. They share config. When one breaks, its neighbors are probably broken too.
The six failures are now registered pitfalls that my agents check for automatically. I built a checklist. No promises about what breaks next — but something will.