Notes

Things that broke, and what they turned out to be. Written down mostly so the next person searching the same error message finds something better than a forum thread with no replies.

1. August 22, 2026Every app I'd built died on the same morning, and there were no crash logsApps installed from Xcode stop launching with no crash report at all. The cause is an expired Apple Development certificate — not the provisioning profile, whose expiry date is different and misleading.
2. August 22, 2026My paywall did nothing for six months, and StoreKit never once returned an errorProduct.products(for:) returns an empty array for a product that isn't on sale — it does not throw. If your paywall reads .first and returns early, the button goes silently dead.
3. August 22, 2026A z-index of 99999 lost to a z-index of 1, and position: sticky was whyposition: sticky always creates a stacking context, so a fixed overlay rendered inside one can never escape it — no matter how large its z-index is.
4. August 22, 2026I wiped my client's production database on a Friday night with a flag that doesn't look dangerous--shadow-database-url points at scratch space the tool is entitled to destroy. I passed it the production URL. What saved it was point-in-time recovery; what failed was keeping a blacklist of dangerous commands.