The original title is "Five ways your safety checks fail (and why blocking good work is the worst)"

Short summary

A solo developer reflects on repeatedly fixing the same category of mistake without learning from it, realizing their safety checks only validate scenarios they already imagined. The author identifies five failure modes for safeguards — blocking good work, missing bad work, crashing, destroying data, and false-passing incomplete work — and argues that blocking legitimate work is the most dangerous because it trains you to override your own guardrails.

• •Green checks prove code survived imagined cases, not that it is correct — real failures come from unimagined scenarios
• •Safeguards have at least five failure modes, not two: blocking good work, missing bad work, crashing, destroying data, false-passing incomplete work
• •Blocking legitimate work is the most dangerous failure because it trains you to override and eventually dismantle your own safety nets

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.