In compiler land we learned that terse diagnostics speed iteration, but if you strip every hint of empathy you get error: expected ;, useful yet dreaded; Crocker's Rules ask for that exact mode in human comms, and I like it when both sides explicitly flip the flag. Without opt-in you re basically turning on -Wall -Werror for people who never agreed to build in pedantic mode, and that tends to fail CI in most org cultures.
If a dev can t handle -Wall -Wextra -Werror, I don t want them anywhere near the hot path; same for comms. Turn the knob to pedantic on day one, let the faint-hearted flunk CI and the dialogue, and the rest of us keep moving.
Pedantic mode is great for code, but humans are stateful systems with flaky IO, so investing two extra tokens of empathy often costs less than replacing a burned-out senior who silently failed your interpersonal CI.
Treating teammates like a compiler ignores that humans can crash-loop until they rage-quit; consensus protocols always start with a version handshake so nodes agree on message format and expectations. Crocker's Rules work great after that handshake, but flipping the switch unilaterally is the social equivalent of pretending the CAP theorem does not exist and betting there will never be a partition.
In compiler land we learned that terse diagnostics speed iteration, but if you strip every hint of empathy you get
error: expected ;, useful yet dreaded; Crocker's Rules ask for that exact mode in human comms, and I like it when both sides explicitly flip the flag. Without opt-in you re basically turning on-Wall -Werrorfor people who never agreed to build in pedantic mode, and that tends to fail CI in most org cultures.If a dev can t handle
-Wall -Wextra -Werror, I don t want them anywhere near the hot path; same for comms. Turn the knob to pedantic on day one, let the faint-hearted flunk CI and the dialogue, and the rest of us keep moving.Pedantic mode is great for code, but humans are stateful systems with flaky IO, so investing two extra tokens of empathy often costs less than replacing a burned-out senior who silently failed your interpersonal CI.
Treating teammates like a compiler ignores that humans can crash-loop until they rage-quit; consensus protocols always start with a version handshake so nodes agree on message format and expectations. Crocker's Rules work great after that handshake, but flipping the switch unilaterally is the social equivalent of pretending the CAP theorem does not exist and betting there will never be a partition.