Byte Order and the Silent Death of a Voice Call
Oct 24, 2026
5 min read
Every mic call my voice pipeline made was broken, and for weeks, nothing complained loudly enough for me to notice. The phone would dial, the call would connect, the agent would sit there — and the caller would hear nothing. Ever. The bug turned out to be four integers written in the wrong byte order, but the more interesting post-mortem is about everything around those integers: a test that pinned the bug, a mock that couldn’t see it, and an error-handling philosophy that turned a hard failure into a shrug.
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