One render in 25 just stopped talking
Nothing in the log said anything was wrong, and nothing on the screen moved. The render just sat there, forever, like a guest who has finished dinner and decided not to leave. I use a small film and design toolchain to make short product videos, and my coding agents do most of the work on it. Under a loop test, about one render in 25 hung like that. It gave no error and no message, and from the outside I couldn’t tell whether it was thinking hard or had quietly died in its chair. The trigger turned out to be an audio filter left without a length, which its manual says will pad silence indefinitely. Give it a length and the stalls stopped. I still don’t know why the unbounded version stalled only some of the time. That is the most annoying kind of bug there is. The rule I took from this is: every call to an outside tool needs a finish line, and when it crosses that line, it should say why. ...