Comparison
Graceful degradationvsHappy path thinking
Graceful degradation
the provider went down and users got a cached answer or an honest error, because you decided that in design rather than at 3am.
A designed answer to 'the model is down or over budget': cached responses, a smaller model, a non-AI code path, or an honest error. Decided in design, not improvised mid-incident.
Full entry →Happy path thinking
the design covered what happens when it works and the review found nothing about what happens when the vendor is down.
Designing, estimating and demoing only the case where everything succeeds. It is the default mode of thought and it is where most of the missing work in an estimate hides, since error handling, retries, partial failure and reconciliation are usually the larger half. The reliable prompt in a review is to ask what happens when each external thing is slow, absent or wrong.
Full entry →