**The silent failure of exception swallowing**

try-except Pass is one of the most dangerous anti-patterns in production code because it turns a crash into a zombie — your system appears healthy while data corrupts or operations silently fail. The fix: always at minimum log the exception, and ideally raise a custom error that preserves context. Swallowing exceptions should be reserved for truly non-critical paths like optional metadata loading where failure is already expected and handled by design.