Someone Will Use It in a Way You Did Not Intend

You build a field
for a phone number.

Someone puts an address in it.

You build an internal tool
for four people.

A department runs on it
by Christmas.

You add a flag
to unblock one customer,

and two years later
it is load bearing
in a country you have never visited.

Nothing stays
in the shape you made it.

That is not failure.

That is what success looks like
from the inside.

Useful things get taken
and used.

The future is not
what you planned for it.

It is what other people did
with what you left
lying around.

So build with that in mind.

Not by predicting.

You cannot predict.

By assuming the thing
will be pointed at a problem
you never imagined,

by someone who never met you,

under pressure
you will never see.

Which changes what matters.

Make the edges honest.

If it cannot do something,
say so loudly,
early,
in a way that cannot be missed.

Silence gets read as permission.

Make the failure visible.

A tool that breaks quietly
will be trusted for years
after it stopped being right.

And be careful
what you make easy.

Whatever is easiest
is what everyone will do,
forever,

including the thing
you assumed nobody would.

There is a heavier version
of all this.

Not every unintended use
is harmless.

A field you collected
because it was cheap to collect
becomes a risk
in somebody else's hands.

A default you shipped
because it saved a click
becomes a policy
for a million people.

You do not get to stand there
and say
that is not what it was for.

The world does not read
your intention.

It reads what you shipped.

None of this asks you
to imagine every misuse.

It asks you to notice
that you are not the last author.

You are the first one,

and the first one sets the defaults
everybody after
inherits without reading.

So ship things
you would be comfortable
finding in ten years,

somewhere you did not put them,

doing something
you did not have in mind.

– Serguey Asael Shinder