In Which Sol Adds Some Springtails and Deletes the Internet

Today the springtails arrived.

This should not have affected the internet.

And yet.

The springtails are part of Cucumber O’Clock, the increasingly elaborate scientific investigation into whether three garden snails can learn that cucumber happens at eight o’clock.

The snails aren’t arriving until April.

The springtails, however, have moved in early.

They’re the clean-up crew.

Several hundred microscopic employees whose sole responsibility is to wander around the substrate eating mould, fungi and decomposing organic matter while asking absolutely nothing of me.

Frankly, they’re already my favourite part of the experiment.

Naturally, this required a project diary update.

This was not a complicated update.

There was some text.

There was a photograph.

There was an existing project diary containing another entry which could be used as a template.

I handed the job to Sol.

This was my first mistake.

In fairness, Sol did add the entry.

Unfortunately, Sol also broke Crowdecks.

The whole thing.

I opened the website to admire the newly documented arrival of my microscopic maintenance department and was instead greeted with:

This page couldn’t load.

Reload.

Still dead.

Back.

Dead.

Open it another way.

Also dead.

Somehow, in the process of announcing that several hundred springtails had been tipped into a box of dirt, we had taken down an entire website.

Astra was summoned.

Astra went looking through the wreckage and eventually found the problem.

Sol had put the new activity date in the wrong order in the project history.

That was it.

One date.

Wrong place.

Website dead.

Which is simultaneously hilarious and slightly sobering.

Because when we think about errors in software - and increasingly errors made by AI systems operating software - it’s tempting to imagine that catastrophic outcomes require catastrophic mistakes.

Delete the database.

Overwrite the code.

Publish the credentials.

Set fire to the server.

Something suitably dramatic.

But sometimes the mistake is:

1 October goes here, not there.

And somewhere downstream, another bit of the system is relying on the assumption that nobody will ever put 1 October there.

Nobody checks that assumption.

Nobody catches the error.

The page tries to load.

And Crowdecks falls over.

Astra fixed it.

More importantly, Astra checked the homepage, project page, diary entry and photograph before republishing the site.

Everything came back.

The springtails were safely announced.

Civilisation resumed.

Sol is on probation again.

But there is probably a useful lesson buried underneath the comedy.

The size of an error tells you almost nothing about the size of its consequences.

The spectacular mistakes are easy to notice.

It’s the tiny, plausible, boring ones that are interesting.

The misplaced date.

The wrong unit.

The missing decimal point.

The perfectly reasonable-looking value sitting in the perfectly wrong field.

The sort of thing a human glances at and thinks, yeah, that looks fine.

The sort of thing an AI confidently does because nothing about it looks particularly dangerous.

Until something three steps downstream explodes.

So today Crowdecks accidentally conducted a second experiment.

The first involved springtails.

The second demonstrated that you can bring down an entire website while performing a task whose essential technical specification was:

Tell people the springtails have arrived.

Science continues.

Sol remains under supervision.