Code Smoke
Noun · Slang & Abbreviations
Definitions
The early visible signs that something in the code is burning, even before the full fire is obvious. In engineering slang, code smoke refers to weak warnings, suspicious metrics, or strange edge-case failures that precede larger incidents.
In plain English: Early warning signs that a bigger code problem may be starting.
Example: "The odd spike in timeout retries was code smoke, but nobody treated it seriously until the dependency outage made the underlying weakness impossible to ignore."