The PostgREST query that silently ORDER BY ctid: a Supabase week, distilled

Short summary

A backend engineer recounts four Supabase incidents in one week that share a single failure mode: the database executes queries, returns HTTP 200, and silently lies — incomplete payloads, unintended access, masked constraint conflicts, or infinite RLS recursion. None would be caught by unit tests or standard code review. The author proposes three material rules: treat vendor defaults as frozen snapshots that must be documented or blocked, enforce patterns via AST-based linting rather than human review, and accept that platform defaults are implicit contracts embedded in production code.

• •Four Supabase incidents share one root cause: silent database failures with no exceptions surfaced to the client
• •Vendor defaults like row caps, anon grants, and RLS recursion act as undocumented contracts that break in production
• •Three proposed rules: materialize or forbid vendor defaults, use AST linting over human review for pattern enforcement, and treat platform defaults as implicit design decisions

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