tell them to proof read!

> code reviews... production outages

> test suite... production outages

Have a staging or integration environment to verify changes.

Most editors have some kind of spelling mistake linting extension, that should help!

Can you get better tools to catch his mistakes earlier?

We run an internal, fullstack platform that developers from other teams use to make their backend systems available to end users.

To standardize design, we created grammar guidelines and fed instructions to an AI review bot. It catches about 90% of them. The rest we manage to find.

When using Claude Code either as a CLI or VS Code extension, ask him to use /review and /security-review when he prepares his PR. These slash commands are surprisingly effective at catching mistakes, including typos. And they usually rank the severity of the mistakes. I mostly make typos in comments and the /review command always catches them and lists them as trivial but worth fixing.

Smaller code reviews. If you are a reviewer and don't feel you are able to review something (ie. to catch the typos) within a reasonable time period, reject the review and ask for it to be smaller.

I've worked with a few dyslexic developers over the years.

The answer is to just be vigilant, patient, and double-check their work.

Many IDEs support spellcheckers, so you could bump up the warning level on suspected spelling errors.

I've only rarely seen them cause run-time issues, but I guess that would be more significant in loosely typed languages where they could slip through to runtime errors more easily.

Install a spellcheck precommit and call it a day.

> less dynamically-typed scripting etc.

What dynamically typed scripting is involved?

If it’s JavaScript, you can gradually migrate to TypeScript and have a Git pre-commit hook to compile (with incremental compilation). And standardise on VSCode or a derivative that makes programmatic typos obvious. Many IDEs will also spell check your strings.

You don't.

I had a similar co-worker 12 years ago. He was a wonderful person, very positive, always nice to deal with, but he clearly had dyslexia. He would type in passwords wrong in our password manager. And he was in charge of our backups so once it came time to restore a backup you discover that none of the passwords work.

He had a terrible track record, so bad that he was passed over for the annual salary bump, he eventually quit and became a middle manager at another company.

Context: severely dyslexic and have a visual stress thing too; both diagnosed, both late in life.

With that out the way. This person, unless completely not self aware, knows they can't spell and are making mistakes.

It's just a fact. Tell them to slow down and double check their work because they're making mistakes. Offer support and point them in the direction of help as appropriate per company guidelines.

But at the end of the day if they're causing issues, they're causing issues and they need to know. It's something they need to adapt to, not you to them.

You cannot engineer your way around this specific person's faults (for want of a better word). You'd have to do the same for the next person who was making mistakes.

TL;DR

Be up front and tell them they are making mistakes and need to improve. Offer support as required.

Since you haven’t mentioned it, have you heard of blameless post-mortems? They’re a systematic approach to this type of issue.

Could you give a few examples? I'd lean towards adjusting tooling if you can.

My spelling is often horrendous and I know it - but almost every dev I know of prefers to copy and paste anything that might be misspelled just because it's easier than taking the risk.

Similarly - how does does this get anywhere near causing a production outage?

I'd be tempted to view this as a blessing in disguise; this person sounds like they'll trip up more often than the rest, but if one individual can cause a production outage with spelling mistakes something's gone awry with your processes elsewhere. You have an opportunity to fix whatever that is now.

I remember that i did not used to make typos but since a particular period that i vaguely rememebr i have noticed that i make more and more of them. It was some kind of switch, not a long period that the transition took place in. I could not pinpoint the reason behind it but my theory is that my speed of typing increased and with it the amount of incidence of hitting the wrong keys. I think it started primarily when my right digits hit faster than my left ones, so letters get switched. It might be neurological or i picked up some trait from some exercises related to reflexes(martial arts), hard to say but all i could recommend is typing slower or trying to write with the style of never taking your hands off the keyboard and typing with all 10 fingers instead of just few, like most of us do. Hard to switch to this style without actual desire to do so, but it is a solution.

I have also switched to mechanical keyboard because i have noticed that i was missing letters despite feeling that i hit the keys. So having more sensitive keyboard helped to mitigate quite a bit of typos. I have the brown tactile switches but i think i would go for the more sensitive red ones in the future to decrease the key travel distance for key press detection.

BTW dyslexia is more about reading rather than writing and it concerns only languages that are not phonetic.

> engineer the problem away: adjust our tooling and config mechanisms, less strings in our configs, less dynamically-typed scripting etc.

This benefits everyone. Give him the tools to be self-sufficient. Especially since he seems to be aware something isn't right, let him deal with that in his own way, with dignity. What action will he be able to take by pointing out he might have dyslexia? That's a difficult problem to solve on its own, let alone knowing that your team is proverbially glaring at you from across the code review table.

Pushing for more correctness in terms of automation sets a good example; either the code is correct for the intended functionality, or it isn't. The closer you get to enforcing that, the better it is for everyone.

In another comment you mentioned JSON configs. JSONschema validation is a must here, anyway. Even it's just part of the CI/CD process. If it's types, or variables, that requires patience. Just mark those with suggestions - one for wherever it's declared, not for each usage. Marking it at the declaration site means that all other usages will also have to be updated anyway.

Anyone on your team could make the same mistake, so see him as an unintended QA step; if his main class of bug is typos in config files, that's a reflection of your codebase, not him.

> The script was part of a MR, the reviewer missed the typo. We noticed it in staging.

Good!

> We introduced tests for config editing scripts after that.

Good!

> And so it went on and on... The problem is not that it happens and we then refine our processes. It is the frequency.

Honestly it looks like he’s forcing you to fortify your delivery pipelines more quickly. It may be annoying, but on the other hand, it might be a blessing in disguise. It’s a choice between paying in full now and paying over multiple years.

But I will say that trying to solve this problem by hiring more perfect humans is a fool’s errand. People will make mistakes; it’s just a question of when the resulting incident occurs and what consequences result.