Law 05 · Context & Reliability
Design for the Worst Case
Plan around the ceiling, not the average.
The principle
When a system says 'up to 24 hours', 'may retry', or 'no guaranteed latency', those limits are the numbers that matter. Designing for the typical case works right up until the rare event, which is exactly when failure costs the most. At scale, those failures aren't edge cases. They're the normal state of things.
The mechanism, the warning signs, a worked example, and the apply-it recipe for this law are in the complete edition.
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