His patches comment was basically early on we realized the collision detection code was horribly broken so we just started patching every edge case we could find. That's practically an endless treadmill. On the other hand when there is a vary specific problem really late in the production cycle that has little do do with the rest of the game then you can just patch that specific problem and ship the code. When an audio driver you have no control over corrupts a single bit in your EXE that is the root problem not the symptom.

Perhaps tricks is not the right word - let's call it "things people do during game development".

The only real problem you have is shipping working product on time. Anything that allows that to happen is a fix.