Git bisect saved me four hours
How a two-minute ritual turned a mysterious regression into a single bad commit.
I want to be honest about the trade-offs here. The approach I settled on solves the problem I had, not every problem of this shape, and there is a clear point where you should reach for something more heavy-duty.
The problem
Tools matter less than the feedback loop they enable. A fast, boring loop beat every sophisticated setup I tried, and I've kept it ever since, even as the rest of the stack changed twice over.
There is a version of this article that opens with theory. I decided against it, because the theory is easy to find and the motivation is not — so let's start with the thing that actually broke.
- Read the error message twice before changing anything
- A second point, kept short on purpose
First attempt
Tools matter less than the feedback loop they enable. A fast, boring loop beat every sophisticated setup I tried, and I've kept it ever since, even as the rest of the stack changed twice over.
By the end of this post you should be able to reproduce the whole thing yourself in under an hour, including the parts I got wrong the first time — those are marked so you can skip them if you're in a hurry.
Everything above is the short version. The full write-up of how this played out is a story for another day — for now, the takeaway is simple: how a two-minute ritual turned a mysterious regression into a single bad commit is a decision you make once and revisit deliberately.