The unowned seam

A build that merged locale files from two frontends kept only the last writer's value for any key the two shared, dropping the other silently. There was no error and no crash; the loss surfaced only as missing strings in one language, caught by hand. The proximate cause is a shallow merge that never asserted its two inputs had disjoint keys. The systemic cause is that the seam between the two frontends' locale ownership belongs to neither team — Conway's law expressed as a silent data path.

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