Hardly Ever and Almost Never

There’s a special little moment that happens when you explain a system to a programmer. You’re cruising along, describing how everything works, and then they ask the dreaded question: “How often does that happen?” And you, being a reasonable person, say: “Oh, hardly ever.” Their left eye twitches. “Hardly ever?” they repeat slowly. “Yeah, almost never,” you add, trying to be helpful. Their right eye twitches. What you’ve just witnessed is the exact moment a programmer realises they are going to have to code for the thing that almost never happens, because “almost never” is not “never,” and the gap between those two words is where systems go to die. The Two Buttons Let me give you a deliberately silly example. Pretend you’ve got a process where a customer is shown two buttons: Button One gives them $100 Button Two gives them $1 You sit down with the programmer and say, “Look, everyone clicks the $100 button. Just code that one.” And the programmer goes, “Hang on. How often does someone…