0fea499957
Every document filename now mirrors its lifecycle state with a status suffix (e.g., .draft.md, .wip.md, .accepted.md). No more bare .md for tracked document types. Also renamed all from_str methods to parse to avoid FromStr trait confusion, introduced StagingDeploymentParams struct, and fixed all 19 clippy warnings across the codebase. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
1.3 KiB
ADR 0015: Plausibility
| Status | Accepted |
| Date | 2026-01-25 |
Context
Most engineering decisions are made in fear of the implausible. We add error handling for errors that won't happen. We build abstractions for flexibility we'll never need. We guard against threats that don't exist.
Decision
Act on the plausible. Ignore the implausible.
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Probability matters. A 0.001% risk does not deserve the same treatment as a 10% risk.
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Rare failures are acceptable. A system that fails once per million operations is not broken.
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Don't guard against fantasy. If you can't articulate a realistic scenario, remove the guard.
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Recover over prevent. For implausible failures, recovery is cheaper than prevention.
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Trust reasonable assumptions. "What if the user passes negative infinity?" is not serious if the user is you.
Consequences
- Less defensive code
- Simpler error handling
- Faster development
- Occasional rare failures that we fix when they occur
The Calculation
Expected Cost = P(failure) × Cost(failure) + P(success) × Cost(prevention)
If P(failure) is near zero, almost any Cost(failure) is acceptable. We waste more engineering time preventing implausible failures than we would spend recovering from them.