INCIDENT: Audit finds 91 changed files; none of them had been changed

The morning started with a git status and returned ninety-one modified files. No pending commits, no edits that day, no file open in the editor. According to the account recorded in the minutes, the first reflex was to check whether someone had touched something without saying so. The second was to check whether someone had touched something while saying so, which in practice is worse.

The number ninety-one came from git status | wc -l, a procedure classified internally as "the only reliable command that morning." With the number in hand, the responsible area called a meeting with four people and invited two more as a precaution. The agenda had one item: unauthorized changes.

The meeting lasted an hour and started with the wrong method. Of the participants, five reviewed the list of files — all perfectly plausible file names, which, according to the later report, "gave the list a credibility it did not deserve." The sixth participant opened the diff. The first line of the diff said, in English, that the file mode had gone from 100644 to 100755. The second line said the same thing about another file. There were eighty-nine others.

"Nobody reads the first line of the diff," explained one of those involved, who asked not to be identified and who, in fact, will not be. "The first line of the diff is never important. Except that when all ninety-one first lines are saying the same thing, something is saying something."

The technical diagnosis is banal and for that very reason embarrassing: the working directory sat on a shared volume that responds with the same permission for every file, including ones that never needed to be executable. The filesystem does not distinguish what is executable; the versioning tool does — and it distinguishes it wrong when it decides to trust the volume instead of the index.

The riskiest moment of the morning was not the alarm, but the proposal presented at 10:40 a.m. to "revert the changes and see what happens." Had it been accepted, the command would have rewritten ninety-one files that never changed content, to fix a permission problem that existed only in the program's head. The proposal was withdrawn for lack of support and an excess of common sense, in that order.

The fix that solved the case is one line, changes a local configuration, and touches no file in the project. It was pasted into the chat at 11:12 a.m. by someone who, according to witnesses, was not in the meeting because they were busy working. On the internal page that documented the problem since 2019, the last edit summed up the situation with a sentence the team decided to keep as is: "this will happen again."

By the end of the day, the ninety-one files were still intact, the fix took one line, and the minutes recorded a decision: review the review process. The committee responsible for that review was created the same day and has already scheduled its first meeting — which, according to the preliminary agenda, will start with the list of files.

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This is a work of satire. Characters, companies, numbers, and the exact time of the chat are invented. If you have ever called a meeting because of a git status that was right, the problem is your shared volume.