Expectation Roulette
One endpoint expected: active=true
Another wanted: is_active=1
And a third, authored long ago by an ancient intern whose spirit still haunts the codebase, insisted on: activeness=Activeness.YES
All technically correct.
All semantically identical.
Sort-of at least.
But all guaranteed to make you question whether software is just an elaborate prank we’ve all agreed to keep running.
It’s like discovering every traffic light in your city has its own personal theory of “green.”
And the buttons - dear god, the buttons.
Rounded here, squared there, and a hover state that only appeared when Mercury was in retrograde.
Users didn’t consciously notice, but they felt it.
Developers noticed because nothing erodes trust faster than a system that keeps breaking its own promises.
The Gospel of “Just This Once”
The intent was noble, or at least convenient.
- “This endpoint just needs to ship.”
- “That button style was faster to copy-paste.”
- “We’ll circle back later.”
Every inconsistency was a tiny act of local optimization. Freedom for the team, speed for the sprint, autonomy in the moment. Nobody thought they were authoring scripture.
But “just this once” is the most prolific prophet in tech.
The Museum of Exceptions
Soon, the system resembled a modern art gallery: a thousand pieces, each with its own interpretive plaque.
Docs multiplied and lack pings became ritual: “Which version of ‘active’ is correct here?”
New hires spent their first month wandering the halls of contradiction, trying to remember which rules were official and which were the creative contributions of that long-departed intern.
It wasn’t documentation anymore.
It was folklore.
Chaos Tax
Call it Predictability Drift, Death by Exceptions, or my personal favorite: Chaos Tax.
Every deviation added overhead.
Every asterisk forced a new mental branch.
It’s like driving through a city where the stop signs are calibrated per block: “stop,” “yield,” “optional if you’re late,” “slow down unless you’re cool.”
You can navigate it, but don’t mistake survival for velocity.
Inconsistency doesn’t scale linearly - it compounds.
One small freedom becomes a forest of forks in the road.
Boring Is a Feature
Here’s the lens that finally clicked for me: predictability is velocity.
Consistency isn’t ascetic minimalism or bureaucratic purity.
It’s leverage.
Every standard is one fewer decision. One fewer doc update.
One fewer panicked midnight debug session.
Predictable systems don’t demand attention.
They fade into the background, letting engineers spend their time on problems that matter.
Which is the whole point: the less you notice the rules, the more useful they are.
One Filter to Rule Them All
These days, I’m less impressed by clever abstractions and more impressed by boring consistency.
A button that looks the same everywhere.
An API that doesn’t change its mind mid-sentence.
Because nothing feels faster than a system that doesn’t make you ask twice.
So yes, give me one predictable flag.
Something gloriously dull, like active=true.
Not is_active=1.
Not activeness=Activeness.YES (may the ancient intern rest in peace).
Just one truth, boring enough to believe in.
One filter to rule them all.
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