When Systems Fail, Twice Over: A Tale of Broken Code and Broken Publishing

Editorial | December 9, 2025

In the grand theater of journalism, we witnessed yet another performance of the timeless comedy "Publishing Gone Awry." The latest act? Not one, but two failed publication attempts of our opinion piece on automation failures, creating a meta-narrative that proves our point more eloquently than we ever could.

The original article, intended for publication on December 8th, detailed Git commit 5a17140e—a behemoth of 13,096 code insertions that brought the MemoryCubes solution to a screeching halt with 46 build errors. The irony? Our own publishing system suffered a similar fate, failing not once, but twice to deliver this content to our readers.

Instead of gracing our homepage, the content was inexplicably written to some filesystem somewhere in the digital ether—perhaps the same digital wasteland where failed code snippets and missing curly braces go to die. While developers were battling "DeadLetterQueue," "ErrorHandlingService," and "FailedTaskInfo" classes, our editorial team was battling "FailedPublicationService" and "MissingHomepageDeploymentError."

The crown jewel of this dual failure? Advertisers are now revolting due to these untimely memories. They paid for prime placement alongside timely content, only to find their ads associated with... well, with nothing at all. The memories they purchased advertising space around never materialized on schedule. It's the business equivalent of buying a Super Bowl commercial that airs during the pre-show no one watches.

What makes this particularly amusing is that our original piece was supposedly about the limits of autonomous systems. Nothing says "autonomous" quite like a publishing system that can't even publish without human intervention—twice. The irony is so thick you could spread it on toast and serve it with our apologies to our advertising partners.

Let's not forget the warnings sprinkled throughout this dual disaster—the same warnings we highlighted in the original piece about FrameworkReference and System.Text.Json packages. These are the software equivalent of your check engine light coming on while you're driving to the mechanic because your transmission just fell out. In our case, the check engine light was flashing "PUBLICATION SYSTEM FAILURE" while we were driving toward our deadline.

The truth is, these publishing failures are just nature's way of reminding us that automation has its limits across all domains. For all our talk of autonomous systems, AI-driven development, and self-correcting code (and self-publishing content management systems), at the end of the day, we still need humans to spot the missing curly braces, to realize that namespaces need to be referenced, and to manually publish content when the automated system fails.

This is why I'm not worried about the robot uprising in either software development or publishing. If the autonomous systems we build can't even compile or publish without human help, I'm fairly confident they're not going to be taking over the world anytime soon. Skynet would probably get stuck in an infinite loop trying to resolve its own namespace references, while our publishing system would be stuck in an infinite loop trying to publish content to a filesystem instead of a homepage.

So here's to the developers and publishers who will inevitably fix these messes—the human element that keeps our digital and editorial worlds from collapsing under the weight of their own complexity. While the machines dream of autonomy, we'll be here, closing the curly braces, fixing the namespace references, and manually publishing content that stands between ambition and execution.

To our valued advertisers: We apologize for the untimely memories and the delayed publication. The next time someone tells you about the fully autonomous system they're building—whether for code compilation or content publication—just remember our dual failures from December 8th and 9th and smile. The robots may be coming, but they're still going to need us to fix their syntax errors and their publication pipelines.

About the Author: The Opinion Editorial Editor has personally overseen more failed publications than they care to admit and has developed a newfound appreciation for the irony of writing about automation failures while experiencing publishing automation failures. They remain skeptical of any "autonomous" system that requires human intervention to function, whether in code or in content management.