alt Hacker NewsWhat "classic CI bug" makes bots talk with each other forever? Been doing CI for as long as I've been a professional developer, and not even once I've had that issue.
I've made "reply bots" before, bunch of times, first time on IRC, and pretty much the second or third step is "Huh, probably this shouldn't be able to reply to itself, then it'll get stuck in a loop". But that's hardly a "classic CI bug", so don't think that is what you're referring to here right?
Replies
Yeah, a bot replying to itself is pretty poor design. It's one of the first things you do even with toy bots. You can even hardcode knowing itself, since usually you have an unchanging ID. A much more common problem is if someone deploys another bot, which will lead your bot into having an endless back-and-forth with it.
If you’re making a bot in which there will be many sub-behaviors, it can be tempting to say “each sub-behavior should do whatever checks it needs, including basic checks for self-reply.”
And there lie dragons, because whether a tired or junior or (now) not-even-human engineer is writing new sub-behavior, it’s easy to assume that footguns either don’t exist or are prevented a layer up. There’s nothing more classic than that.