"bugs were appearing everywhere out of the blue. The codebase was a huge mess of nulls, undefined behaviour, bad error handling. It was so bad that we actually lost a client over this."

Especially wild considering their product is literally an automated bug finder lol.

> I wouldn’t admit to this level of frankly incompetence.

Well yeah. It reminds me of how I wrote an addon for WoW, while having no clue how to write GUI code, learning lua and Blizzard API as I go, and having no tools except a text editor. It took 3-4 sharp ideological shifts, till I got to reading about elm architecture, and refactored all the code into it, while using addons helping with debugging issues, using a scaffold to create throw away addons for testing details of how WoW API functions/object work, using Ace library for messages and some other things, using my another addon to track events to learn when and which events WoW fires... Near the end I was a pretty competent addon developer, but the most part of my way there I was just trying a lot of things to see what works.

> Why would you be so loud and proud about all this.

Oh, I also like to tell my story of how it was. When I finally got it work on clean elm architecture with clear separation of state, view and update, I was proud, obviously, but even before that I was proud because of Danning-Kruger. My code was a way better than the original addon, and it was becoming better and better with each sharp turn. It is funny in hindsight.

Same. Admitting to it is one thing, but still it takes a certain kind of attitude to outright forbid people to write tests.

I think there's a real possibility this is a "no such thing as bad publicity" stunt.