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My approach is what I call defensive programming, with a different meaning than the usual usage of the term. I assume that my coworkers are idiots that aren't going to read my documentation, so I make all public classes and methods etc. as idiot-proof as possible to use. Hasn't saved me from every issue caused by my teammates never reading my docs or asking me questions, but it's definitely prevented several.

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> assume that my coworkers are idiots

I know (most?) people don't mean it literally when writing something like this but I still wonder why such self-evident ideas as "make things easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly" are framed in terms of "idiots who don't rtfm".

The best documentation is what wasn't written because it (actually!) wasn't needed. On the other hand, even if people aren't "idiots", they still make mistakes and take time to figure out (perhaps by reading tfm) how to do things and complete their tasks, all of which has a cost. Making this easier is a clear benefit.

The bigger the codebase, we all eventually find ourselves in scenarios where we were the idiot. Making the APIs as foolproof as possible, utilizing tools like Semgrep, deprecating stuff in the way your language supports that it shows up in the IDE,… all that stuff should be utilized.

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