Gotcha: chasing a bug that was never in my code

This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry . The build was done. Themis Lex worked on my machine, and not in the "works if you squint" way. A court clerk enters their role, describes their workflow, picks a data sensitivity level, and gets back a PDF with two sections: where AI can safely support the work, and where it must never touch it. Claude via Bedrock generates the assessment. Server-side PDF render. No accounts, no storage, session ends when the download does. Three weeks solo, for the Women in AI Accelerator Spring 2026 Build Challenge. Initial commit went in at 7:06pm on May 9. I pushed to AWS Amplify . Build went green. I opened the live site, filled out the form, hit submit. Nothing. Twenty eight seconds later, "Request timed out." I told myself the bug was not in my code. Everything ran locally. This had to be a platform problem. That belief carried me all night. It mostly held up. The exception was the first thing I should have checked. Here is the commit log, because it tells the story better than I can: 19:06 Initial commit: Themis Lex MVP 20:31 refactor: migrate Bedrock auth to IAM compute role 22:29 diag: log credential env vars at runtime (booleans only, remove after fix) 22:40 fix: forward BEDROCK_MODEL_ID to SSR runtime via next.config.js env 22:50 fix: switch to InvokeModelWithResponseStreamCommand to beat 28s Lambda timeout ... 06:28 fix: remove unused type export that broke isolatedModules build 06:37 fix: end-to-end response streaming to beat Amplify 28s gateway timeout 06:48 fix: reduce max_tokens to 3000 to fit Amplify 30s timeout 06:52 fix: reduce max_tokens to 2000, 3000 still exceeded 30s timeout 07:00 fix: switch to Claude Haiku 4.5 to fit Amplify 30s timeout Ten and a half hours from first deploy to the fix that shipped it. That gap between 22:50 and 06:28 is me sleeping on it, which turned out to be the second most productive thing I did. The error message was the absence of an error message My f