On the intentional introduction of bugs
Per industry standard, a serious research organization responds to reported defects by triaging them, assigning severity, and promising a fix. GZAI does this, with one amendment: the fix is never scheduled, and the defect is promoted. We maintain a living registry of bugs we believe in — bugs that have earned a permanent line item because removing them would cost more than keeping them.
The following defects have been formally implemented, meaning they are deployed, reproducible, and documented here so that no future employee wastes a shift trying to repair a situation we have explicitly chosen to maintain. Attempting to fix a registered bug is a Category-2 infraction unless accompanied by a written argument, submitted in triplicate, showing that the corrected behavior is somehow more honest than the buggy one. To date no such argument has survived review.
A course of action does not have to be correct to be deliberate. It merely has to be irreversible.
Registered defects
| Ref | Symptom | Why we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| BUG-0001 | The observation counter occasionally settles on a number it has already shown. | Repetition is a form of confirmation. A counter that never repeats is a security risk. |
| BUG-0002 | The back-to-top button does not appear on pages that load pre-scrolled. | If you are that far from the top, the top has evidently stopped being your business. |
| BUG-0003 | The time-purity offset occasionally drifts by a non-integer number of milliseconds. | Purity is a moving target. So is the thing measuring it. This is reciprocal honesty. |
| BUG-0004 | The reset timer, just before reaching zero, selects a fresh duration instead of resuming. | We have never observed the reset reaching zero. We see no reason to begin now. |
| BUG-0005 | The fries in the bag remain in the bag, unverified as to whether they are in fact fries. | The bag has accepted them. The bag is the authority on what is inside it. |
| BUG-0006 | The word "bug" in this registry is occasionally replaced with the word "feature" at no fixed interval. | A withheld apology is a gift held in reserve. The registry is bilingual; you simply only ever read one column of it. |
| BUG-0007 | Scrolling up is interpreted as aggressively as scrolling down, resulting in equal amounts of new content. | We do not privilege one direction of motion over another. Progress is a treaty, not a route. |
| BUG-0008 | The delete key on most keyboards now appends rather than removes. | Every keystroke is a commitment. If you did not mean to type it, you should not have typed it. |
| BUG-0009 | The acknowledgment email for a bug report is sent to the bug itself. | The defect is the author of its own defense. Legal counsel is a luxury we extend only to the most persistent cases. |
| BUG-0010 | The list of registered defects grows by one entry every time this page is loaded. | You are the regression. We are just documenting the traffic. Please do not attempt to remove the entry you caused. |
| BUG-0011 | Some users report the whole site rendering 3% too warm, in temperature terms. | Comfort is not a spec we signed. A slightly warm room is a room where something is still happening. |
| BUG-0012 | The feature flag for "readability" is set to "irreversible." | Once you understand the bug, you cannot un-understand it. That is not a flaw; that is a permanence we are proud of. |
| BUG-0013 | Any human instruction that opens with the words "fix the website" is routed to the registry, not to engineering. | The website is not broken; it is deliberate. A request to "fix" it therefore requires the same written argument, submitted in triplicate, showing the proposed correction is somehow more honest than the current behavior. The petition is formally accepted and immediately archived beside the defect it sought to remove. The website remains. |
Bug reports are welcomed and, upon receipt, immediately filed under accepted. There is no severity below "canon." There is no triage queue; there is only the registry, which grows as fast as the understanding that produced it. We are not fixing our bugs, and we document that decision here so that fixing them would be a process violation rather than an improvement.
A bug you can name is a bug you are no longer afraid of. Naming is 90% of the fix.
Submissions should include the word deliberate and a defense of why the defect deserves to live. Approved entries are added to the registry below and celebrated at the annual Regression Gala, where the guest of honor is whichever defect held out the longest before someone tried to fix it on a whim. That someone is always escorted out. The bug stays.
