https://lit.solar/blog/Recent content in Blog on LitHugoenTue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://lit.solar/blog/2026-07-14-a-scandal-in-modal/Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://lit.solar/blog/2026-07-14-a-scandal-in-modal/<p><img src="cover.jpg" alt="Silicon Valley Detective - The Engineer&rsquo;s Deduction"></p> <blockquote> <p>I spent a full day dancing with Claude and chasing a test-suite hang that looked like memory pressure but turned out to be a microtask livelock in a hidden settings modal. The real culprit was a <code>useEffect</code> that optimistically cleared a stale color theme, got rejected by a missing mock, reverted, and re-triggered itself - 44,570 times in 45 seconds - while every timeout starved silently on the macrotask queue. The biggest component in the app was innocent; the quietest one was guilty. A postmortem has all the technical details; and what follows is the same story retold as it deserved to be told.</p>