When a checker stays green from the day it goes live, there are only two explanations: nothing is broken, or it isn’t looking.<\/p>\n
On screen, the two look exactly the same.<\/p>\n
The script was supposed to catch design tokens written out as raw hex colors. We ran it the day we wrote it: green. We ran it every day after that: green. Two weeks later someone stumbled on an obvious raw hex value by hand, and we went back to ask why the script hadn’t flagged it. The regex was missing a character class, and the scan scope resolved to an empty list. Every day it had carefully scanned zero files and reported a pass.<\/p>\n
The cost wasn’t the two weeks. It was that for those two weeks we believed<\/strong> someone was watching, so we stopped looking ourselves.<\/p>\n A corrected regex only fixes this one case. The real fix: every checker has to ship with an input that makes it fail.<\/strong><\/p>\n Every validator we run now has a That’s when the green light started to mean something. Now it says, “I looked, and I’ve proven I can see.”<\/p>\n The same shape turns up elsewhere.<\/p>\n Design guidelines without examples of misuse are just a pile of suggestions. Nobody can tell whether the image in front of them breaks the rules. A handoff document that no one has followed from scratch is just a well-written memoir.<\/p>\n \u26d4 The test is simple: can you point to something that would make it say no?<\/strong> If you can’t, it isn’t guarding anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We once ran a validator for two weeks without a single red light. Then we found out it hadn’t been catching anything since day one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1025,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-craft-notes-en-us"],"yoast_head":"\nFixing the regex isn’t the fix<\/h2>\n
--selftest<\/code>. It feeds the checker deliberately broken sample data, and if the checker doesn’t complain, --selftest<\/code> itself exits with code 1.<\/p>\nIt isn’t only about code<\/h2>\n