Yes, something strange happens in large systems, where it's better to assume they work the way they are supposed to, rather than deal with how they (currently) work in reality.
It's common in industry for (often very productive) people to claim the "code is the source of truth", and just make things work as bluntly as possible. Sprinkling in special cases and workarounds as needed. For smaller systems that might even be the right way about it.
For larger systems, there will always be bugs, and the only way for the number of bugs to tend to zero is for everyone to have the same set of strong assumptions about how the system is supposed to behave. Continuously depending on those assumptions, and building more and more on them will eventually reveal the most consequential bugs, and fixing them will be more straightforward. Once they are fixed, everything assuming the correct behavior is also fixed.
In large systems, it is worse to build something that works, but depends on broken behavior than to build something that doesn't work, but depends on correct behavior. In the second case you basically added an invariant check by building a feature. It's a virtuous process.
Yes, something strange happens in large systems, where it's better to assume they work the way they are supposed to, rather than deal with how they (currently) work in reality.
It's common in industry for (often very productive) people to claim the "code is the source of truth", and just make things work as bluntly as possible. Sprinkling in special cases and workarounds as needed. For smaller systems that might even be the right way about it.
For larger systems, there will always be bugs, and the only way for the number of bugs to tend to zero is for everyone to have the same set of strong assumptions about how the system is supposed to behave. Continuously depending on those assumptions, and building more and more on them will eventually reveal the most consequential bugs, and fixing them will be more straightforward. Once they are fixed, everything assuming the correct behavior is also fixed.
In large systems, it is worse to build something that works, but depends on broken behavior than to build something that doesn't work, but depends on correct behavior. In the second case you basically added an invariant check by building a feature. It's a virtuous process.