A unit test written a decade ago for the Servo browser engine is causing problems today. Someone included a cookie expiry date of April 18, 2026 in the test, which seemed like a distant future at the time. Now that date is approaching, and Servo's continuous integration pipeline is broken until a maintainer merges a fix.

Servo is an open-source browser engine originally developed by Mozilla. When the test was written 10 years ago, the project was only 3 years old. The developer who set that date probably thought 2026 was far enough in the future that someone else would handle it. These kinds of hardcoded dates become ticking clocks in long-lived software projects.

A pull request (#44341) is waiting for a maintainer to merge the fix and get CI running again. This serves as a reminder that assumptions about the future in code often come back to haunt you - even 10 years later.