Claude has helped me solve some issues that I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have been able to tackle alone, I’ll summarize them here. I’ll try to make this into a separate page on the blog.

2026-09-10: a buggy javascript build and a race condition

The v3.12.xx line of vesions of the OHIF image viewer have a very frustrating type of bug in them. I couldn’t reproduce it on my dev machine neither in Chrome or Firefox, neither on my Android phone’s browser. It showed up consistently (after an inital load followed by a page refresh) for 2 teammates who used Windows and then when I tried in a Windows VM I could also reproduce it.

The bug was about a javascript build tool applying an incorrect optimization (assuming some global JS variable is always available, namely __filename, which isn’t inside the browser) as well as a race condition that depended on the order of .js and .css files being loaded (document.currentScript getting set or not).

Claude not only found it, it understood how to trigger the error and wrote a small python script that brought up a server with an artificial delay on that .css file thus reproducing the race. After just a few minutes claude had 2 instances of that dummy server running, one constantly missing the bug, the other constantly reproducing it. I could have never, ever figured this out on my own.