Catch Flakes On Main

Catch Flakes On Main May 14, 2026 A small Mechanical Habit today: When using not rocket science rule / merge queue, continue to redundantly run the full test suite on main. Maintain an easily accessible list of recent main failures — these are the flaky tests to eradicate. For an example, see the “Flakes” link on https://devhub.tigerbeetle.com Flaky tests are tests that fail intermittently, once in a thousand runs. This might be due to a genuine bug (assumptions about scheduling that mostly hold) or due to instability of underlying infrastructure (e.g., inability to download a release from GitHub, or to delete a folder on Windows). In either case, flaky tests are a huge productivity drain — as the size and complexity of test suite grows, more and more CI runs fail spuriously, even as each individual test almost always passes. Flaky tests are challenging to deal with — if you are working on landing a PR and your CI fails due to an obvious flake, the temptation to just re-run the test…