Something about whitequark mentioning trust issues with compilers reminded me of the prank that some former Commodore employees described in Dave Haynie's death bed vigil.

"consider also the extreme trust issues that a misbehaving compiler gives people who use it." (whitequark)

Essentially some engineers describe how they had pranked a previous co-worker by taking Amiga KickStart 2.0 ROMs (essentially the microcode or BIOS [or (U)EFI] for Amigas) and surreptitiously modifying them to appear as if they were 1.3 KickStart ROMs since their coworker was reluctant to upgrade:

https://youtu.be/BaTjwo1ywcI?t=5705 (around the 1 hour 35 minute and 5 second mark).

So the paranoid coworker, was apparently correct to be paranoid, yet the prankster paradigms only kicked in after the other coworkers were so annoyed at the crying wolf so as to prank him. I don't even know how to describe this sort of thing; it's not quite a "Reflections on trusting trust" Ken Thompson sort of thing, since most folks don't imagine that their ROMs are going to be tampered with by coworkers who are pranksters.

In effect, it isn't intrinsically malicious intent, yet the story is definitely a doozy.