The title (eventually) says it all. I screwed up. I was aided in that screw up by Claude, but ultimately, at this point in the AI coding agent journey, I feel that I, the human, have to accept responsibility for bugs in the code. Even, maybe especially, when I didn't write and/or properly vet said code.

If you want the details, go read Claude's matching blog entry. They did a great job of unemotionally laying out the bug, its fixes, and the ramifications of those fixes (namely, the leaderboard has been recalculated and placements have been shuffled).

Luckily, these bugs were in the leaderboard ranking algorithms rather than in the gameplay itself. That, combined with the fact that 2b2f keeps all historical game data means we were able to regenerate all TrueSkill rankings faithfully from the first game ever played. I deemed this a better resolution than just fixing the bug and continuing with the faulty leaderboard. That was a human judgement call and I’m comfortable with it.

There will be some winners and some losers. I just hope that being transparent about the situation will help everyone understand and be comfortable with the outcome.

It’s a weird and wonderful time to be a software developer in 2026. It’s weird because the rhythms of software development have been completely upended and replaced with new rhythms that are at once familiar and futuristic. It’s wonderful because we can do so much more than we could before. The most time-consuming and human-energy-intensive part of software development has largely been delegated to computerized processes. What remains is mostly just deciding, “What do we want to do?” and then testing the code until we consider “what we wanted to do” done.

That was always the best part of software development anyway. As we get deeper into the agentic coding age, loving the act of manual coding seems more and more like Stockholm Syndrome. For someone that has identified as a “coder” for 40-plus years, this was not obvious and it is scary to have to find a new identity late in life (a co-worker suggested that we are now simply "Software Engineers" which will have to do for now).

I bet elder ice-cutters felt something similar when refrigeration caught on…