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The Consequences of Your Code

Tom Scott | February 6, 2026



This is the story of one of the best, and also one of the worst, text messages I’ve ever received. It’s about harm, about consequences, and about the responsibilities that designers, coders and hackers have to make sure we treat other people with care.

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Written by Tom Scott

Comments

This post currently has 26 comments.

  6. @dwpj65

    February 6, 2026 at 11:21 am

    Just passing the user through to a human operator when errors are encountered is one of the best error handling strategies I’ve experienced in 4 decades!!!

  8. @SimonJM

    February 6, 2026 at 11:21 am

    Even 'knowing' what values can be assigned to a vriables I always coded a 'default' option if using a case/evaluate stateent – just in case!
    On a call to my GP (NOT for test results of ny kind I hasten to add ..!!!) the automated system obviously was (at this point in the system) constructed of two (maybe three) parts, the "You are number" <insert number here> "in the queue". It went around from 4, to 3, 3 again, 3 again (each of these around 40 seconds apart), followed by "you are number .. fifty .. in the queue". I was a bit taken aback, but being an ex-progarmmer I worked on the basis that it was some form of file loading/timing issue and waited – sure enough after another 40 seconds or so I was back to "number … three .. in the queue". I did tell the surgery and they were suitably amused/concerned/bewildered as no-one had mentioned this happening to them before.

  21. @Garfield91076

    February 6, 2026 at 11:21 am

    This is all well and good but regular programmers aren't paid to secure it from all angles. That responsibility comes down to management realizing its a good idea and allowing programmers to be paid to do more than get the code to work. Money talks and if its not about making money then you don't do it/get to do it. Its the real world.

  23. @dagda1180

    February 6, 2026 at 11:21 am

    I know this is an old video, but I assume it's just that the Excel file was filled in incorrectly. And when a non-applicable result is given, it defaults to a human.

Comments are closed.

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