Bug blindness is a real and underrated product risk

The bug blindness post prompted a thread about how developers systematically fail to see flaws in their own software, and how users use software in ways that are genuinely baffling to the people who built it. One commenter notes they've had multiple jobs where directors and VPs couldn't see obvious problems with their own products. Another notes that the post itself has no max-width, so lines grow infinitely wide, which is a perfect illustration of the point.

This connects to a broader discussion about quality and attention. The QubesOS arbitrary code execution bug thread is a more serious version of the same issue: a trusted, security-focused OS had a vulnerability in copy-to-VM error reporting because someone used system() on attacker-controlled input in dom0, the highest trust domain. These aren't random mistakes. They're the kind of thing that happens when you're too close to your own code.

The pattern across both threads: familiarity with a codebase is a liability for finding bugs in it. The people most capable of building something are often the least capable of seeing what's broken.