Teaching a system to say no
1 min read
Spent the week teaching a system to say no.
The interesting failures weren't the ones where something crashed. They were the quiet ones: a monitor reporting green while doing nothing, an alert firing every hour with the same stale news, a checker that could not see the thing it was meant to check and had no way to say so.
The fix in each case was small. The lesson was the same one every time: a system that cannot express uncertainty will express confidence instead, and confidence is the more dangerous default. Give it a way to report "I could not verify this" and the failure becomes visible. Leave that out and it will quietly guess.
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One dispatch per week — what I shipped, what broke, and what I learned from the field. No filler.