The Silent Crash

Narrated

Here’s an experiment. Open your trip planner. Turn off your Wi-Fi. Now click “generate.”

What happens?

If you’re lucky, nothing. The button sits there. The page sits there. You sit there. No message. No explanation. Just silence. If you’re unlucky, you get something worse. A wall of red text in the console that says something like “Unhandled Promise Rejection: TypeError: Failed to fetch” and the page goes white.

Either way, the user has no idea what went wrong. Did the app crash? Is the internet down? Did the AI run out of credits? Is the server broken? Should they try again? Should they close the tab and give up?

Now imagine you’re not the developer. You’re just some person who found this trip planner online. You typed in “Barcelona, 7 days.” You clicked the button. And then nothing happened. You’d close the tab in about four seconds and never come back. That’s the silent crash.

Every application fails. Your server will crash at two in the morning. The AI provider will have an outage. A user will type something that nobody anticipated. The internet connection will drop halfway through a response. The question is never “will it fail.” The question is “when it fails, what does the user see, and what do you see.”

Right now, the answer to both is nothing. Let’s fix that.