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You can have some idea, but it’s not like estimating the time and cost of building a house.

Makes sense only if you assume building software is like building a house. Imagine getting an author to tell you when the novel they are writing will be finished?

Or this: imagine seeking an estimate on when a house will be built, trimmed, painted, furnished, decorated, and filled with every item needed practically and for comfort by the homeowner.

It’s a living process that requires continuous reassessment of priorities and scope, and in fact never finishes when you consider the life of the home.

They sort of touched on this point in the movie:

>No one exceeds their potential. If they did, it would mean we did not accurately gauge their potential in the first place.

This is why I thought it was one of the more interesting problems in the list. There’s a lot of potential suffering that can fit inside an eternity.

Would your answer change if you were stuck on the trolley quite literally for eternity, rather than just the remainder of your biological life?

I suppose I'm hedging my bets by using vim in VSCode.

> My suspicion is that staring at objects closely and under dimly lit conditions causes pseusdo-myopia

Are you implying that cell phones could be a factor?

I've worked on a service that handled credentials where we added tests like this to try to catch if a log statement gets added containing the username/password. We used a few end to end tests rather than attempting to include something like this is the unit tests for every function.

Our tests would set up the app's full context, get a hook into the logging framework to watch for log statements, then make requests to the service containing a set of dummy credentials, like { username: "foo", password: "bar" }. If a log statement containing "foo" or "bar" was detected the test failed.

It's not going to catch every type of issue, but at least some potential footguns can be preventing this way.

The article mentioned that the blog itself is hosted on a replit, so I guess that's one example.

This seems like it would be great for rapid prototyping.