File path separators are a common pain point when writing cross platform software. Of course, not every programming language has a graceful API for handling that. For example, prior to C++ 17, you had to do some #ifdef preprocessor magic to handle that. Which people usually did (or they'd use the Boost suite of libraries).

Code like this wouldn't be out of place or incorrect:

Gretchen's company recently got purchased by Initech. Specifically, they were bought for their dev team, of all things. They had a few software products that were high performers, and Initech wanted that secret sauce. They bought the company, and then split the dev team up and migrated the developers to new products.

That actually worked out okay for Gretchen, most of the time. For a few projects, the dev team was given some requirements and a free hand to figure out how to deliver them. They were free to reuse code that existed or rewrite entirely, based on their own judgement. They were free to pick the tools they wanted to use, and the results worked out well.

Today's anonymous submitter works in finance. I'll let them start the introduction:

This is a legacy application that has been running for nearly a decade in production so one could say that it's been thoroughly tested by daily production use and nothing needs changing

Lillith was integrating some new tools into an existing Ruby on Rails API. The existing API allowed you to send a dry_run flag along with the request, so that you could have the service calculate its changes without applying them.

The problem was, the new tool Lillith was integrating could send, in the body of the request, {"dry_run": false}, but the service would see it as true. Consistently.