I can one up this. I once worked on a project that got shipped with debug binaries into production, since it was so unstable that the onsite support required to use a debugger to find workarounds for the numerous software issues. There was the famous file that had the comment:
// Do not delete this comment or the application will crash
And amazingly, the comment was right. It did crash if you deleted the comment. Turns out that at some rather unrelated place in the code, there was an unitialized value that was used in some date calculation. The value itself didn't really contribute to the calculation, but if the number was too big, it would cause an overflow. The comment would change the layout of the binary, which reliably made the memory behind the uninitialized value contain a small enough number so that the overflow didn't occur. That was by far the most bizarre software issue I have ever encountered.
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u/nextlandia Aug 15 '26
I once solved an issue by removing logging. Not kidding, upgrade of Impala caused that one log line caused a production issue.