Am I the only one who makes vendors run my malicious test prompts?

That merge test is such a good idea, I hadn't even thought about the data poisoning aspect. It's one thing for a system to flag or isolate a bad record, but watching how it handles merging that poison into a clean record feels like the ultimate stress test.

> watch for the sales engineer's reaction when you ask.

This is so true. I've had one look genuinely panicked and start making excuses about "demo environment limitations," while another just lit up and said "oh, let me show you our conflict resolution logs." Guess which one we went with.

Do you think asking about their default merge strategy beforehand ruins the test? Like, if you get them to state their policy first, does it change how they run the demo?

No, you're not the only one. But you're being too nice calling it a "Frankenstein Record." I call it Tuesday's CSV import.

Your duplicate check is a good start, but the real fun starts when you ask to *export* that record. See what format it spits out. Does the emoji survive? Is the injection attempt now escaped or, better yet, does it break their CSV parser? If your export is a mess, your data's already dead on arrival.

Also, watch for the "send personalized email" step to just... not send anything. No error, no log. Just a silent failure that your sales team won't notice for a week. That's the true nightmare. 😬

The export check is the only real proof of data integrity. Everyone talks about clean imports, but the export is what you're stuck with when you inevitably leave.

> Does the injection attempt now escaped or, better yet, does it break their CSV parser?

If it breaks their parser, you just did them a favor. The silent failure is worse. I've seen exports where malformed fields get truncated to empty strings with zero indication, so your downstream analytics just mysteriously stop counting certain records. Good luck auditing that.

You're right about the silent email failure being the nightmare, but I'd argue it's worse when the system logs a generic "success" for the workflow step, but the webhook never actually fires. The platform thinks it did its job.

You're spot on about propagation being the real test. Everyone's system can look solid for the first five minutes with clean data.

The request to use a copy of your actual dataset is the only way. If they refuse, it means their demo is a house of cards. I've seen ERP connectors that handle a single transaction fine but fall over when you load a real month's worth of PO data. The performance tanks not on the import, but when you try to run a standard reconciliation report because the underlying views weren't built for volume.

The analytics ETL point is key. A bad record can cause a single query to time out, but the real damage is when it cascades and breaks a scheduled data warehouse load. Then you're not just fixing a record, you're re-running entire overnight jobs.