The Robustness Illusion: In Depth

Six anti-patterns of silent failure observed in production: broad except clauses that bury signals, startup-time WorkOS resolution that continues with stale state, Optional[T] return types that collapse 'not found' and 'failed', and — climactically — an auth fallback that bypasses authentication entirely. A four-level taxonomy of error suppression and a remediation framework grounded in 'let it crash' and fail-fast principles.