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Reading / 2026-06/2026-06-10t073045-the-unwritten-laws-of-software-engineering

The Unwritten Laws of Software Engineering

Seven hard-won engineering rules — from rolling back before debugging to treating every external dependency as a future outage — distilled from real production incidents and costly mistakes.

Jun 10, 2026 · tech · Anton Zaides, manager.dev

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Topics

  • software-engineering
  • engineering-craft
  • production-systems
  • reliability
  • observability

Cited by

  • Engineering craft

    Engineering craft is the accumulated discipline of writing, organizing, and maintaining software well — spanning code design, tooling fluency, communication, and the judgment to know when technical excellence actually changes outcomes.

  • Observability

    Observability spans infrastructure, distributed systems, and AI agents — the practice of making system internals legible through traces, events, and feedback signals so engineers can understand, debug, and improve what they've built.

  • Production systems

    The engineering decisions that determine how software behaves under real load, covering durability, observability, testing discipline, performance constraints, and the operational costs of failure.

  • Reliability

    Reliability in software systems is achieved through structural constraints and environmental design rather than prompting, validation, or testing alone, as sources from agent engineering to durable execution consistently show.

  • Software engineering

    Software engineering spans craft, process, and judgment — how code is structured, tested, reviewed, deployed, and maintained — and the sources collected here collectively interrogate each layer as AI tooling reshapes who does what and why.

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