> His real belief was not exactly that the PR broke it, it's that the root cause of the break was isolated to his code changes. This is evident from the debugging procedure he described. And that distinction is very important, because that detail, and not some abstract piece of philosophy, is also the real source of the challenges that motivated describing the situation in a blog post in the first place.

Yes, but the exact same point can be made about the Gettier case. The problem is inappropriately specified beliefs. The problem with that is that it's impossible ex-ante to know how to correctly specify your beliefs.

For instance, you could just say that the problem with the Gettier case is that the person really just believed there was a "cow-like object" out there. Voila, problem solved! But the fact of the matter is that the person believes there is a cow - just like this person believes that their PR broke the app.

I think I agree with the parent. While this can be made into a Gettier case by messing with the scope of the JTB (pull request broke it vs change broke it) I don't think it really works as intended by the author, and it feels like a poor example in a field teeming with much more straight forwards instances.

I can't simplify the explicit examples I have in my head enough to be worth typing up, but the gist is that I can be correct about the end behavior of a of a piece of code, but can be completely wrong about the code path that it takes to get there. I have good reasons to believe it takes that code path. But I don't know about signal handler or interrupt perhaps, that leads to the same behavior, but does not actually use the code path I traced out.

This happens to me reasonably often while debugging.

I think this is accurate, and not at all pedantic.

The idea that software has 'gettiers' seems accurate and meaningful. To some degree, making and maintaining gettiers is in fact the point of black-boxing. Something like a well-implemented connection pool is designed to let you reason and code as though the proxy didn't exist. If you form beliefs around the underlying system you'll lack knowledge, but your beliefs will be justified and ideally also true.

(One might argue that if you know about the layer of abstraction your belief is no longer justified. I'd argue that it's instead justified by knowing someone tried to replicate the existing behavior - but one form of expertise is noticing when justified beliefs like that have ceased to be true.)

And yet this story isn't about facades breaking down, it's just a common debugging error. Perhaps the precise statement the author quotes is a true and justified, but the logic employed isn't. And it's an important difference: being aware of environment changes you didn't make is a useful programming skill, while being aware of broken abstractions and other gettier problems is a separate useful skill.

Agreed. This is not some unusual philosophy case. This is a case of a programmer who should know better (rebase is not exactly a no-op change!) ignoring one of the most obvious possibilities.

I think you're interpreting the author's belief in a way that you want rather than what he actually says. I read the belief based on this statement from the article:

"When I released the new version, I noticed that I’d broken the autofocusing of the search field that was supposed to happen on pageload."

That's it. That's the belief - he broke autofocusing when he released the new version. This was true. The later digging in to find the root cause is merely related to this belief. And yes I agree that Gettier's cases were meant to show that correct belief for the wrong reasons (maintaining the three criteria essentially), but this case meets that intent as well. The author is correct that he broke autofocus via his pull request, and thus JTB holds, but the actual reason for it is not his personal code and thus the Knowledge is incorrect.