What I keep forgetting about timeouts

Most of the trouble I see in production comes from boundary cases someone promised would never happen. The code is fine. The plan is fine. The promise is what ages badly.

There's a kind of premature optimization that comes from imagining a future team. "What if someone needs to swap this out?" Often, no one does.

If a config file has more than a dozen options, half of them aren't being used. The other half are being used in ways the original author didn't predict.