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Silent failures: three bugs that returned success but did nothing

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A developer building a business verification API encountered three consecutive bugs that all reported success while silently failing to function. A South Korean government API returned HTTP 200 with empty results when given a wrong parameter value, meaning it would have falsely confirmed no sanctions for every company queried. A scheduled Cloud Run job displayed a green checkmark each time it ran, but a one-line path comparison error on Linux prevented the actual code from ever executing. A third bug caused curl in Git Bash to mangle Korean UTF-8 characters in URLs, returning zero search results and nearly triggering a deep investigation into the wrong part of the system. The incidents highlight a costly and underappreciated failure mode: errors that look like success, spanning API design, deployment platforms, and developer tooling.

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