The article gets into what I'll call correctness, near the end, but doesn't highlight that in the lede.

I think correctness is often much more important than efficiency, elegance and other things that can sound like conceits or misalignments.

I don't mean some academic or niche formal proofs notion of correctness. I mean ordinary everyday minimal level of competence of systems. This includes that the system exists in the actual real-world environment of normal users, as well as the actual real-world environment of attackers. We often fall flat on both aspects.

It's one of the biggest problems in software. On average, our field behaves like criminally irresponsible, incompetent clowns, who casually pull prop clown horns out of our posteriors (and StackOverflow and ChatGPT), commit them as part of our sprints, and call it done. And frequent "security updates" and "bug fixes" for what should be considered irresponsible failures needing deeper corrective action.

Personally, I'm considering next working on things that have a high priority to work correctly. Which by default is humbling, but it becomes downright scary, when you consider that very little of the software, infrastructure, and personnel ecosystem on which we depend has been developed with a sufficiently responsible and competent mindset.