Not always. Contracts for example sometimes contain landmines that lay undiscovered for a decade or more.

A key difference is that law is an actual profession. It has qualification, continuing professional development and licensing requirements, and personal consequences for getting it wrong. None of these things are true for software development.

I’m pretty fluent in both worlds and they are actually highly equivalent on this one specific point.

In both cases it looks perfect and it works right up until it doesn’t, usually for the same reason, entering an unanticipated state.

I would argue they are pretty similar. It's not hard for a bad clause in a contract to get overlooked at first and then become a problem years later. Example:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/think-commas-don-t-matt...

Unfortunately that's not always the case. Bad _arguments in a case_, sure, but bad contracts? I'd fully expect that in 30 years some unfortunate lawyer will be attempting to untangle nonsense drafted by a 2020s LLM.

(Actually, it only just occurred to me, lots of laypeople are going to use these to draft _wills_, aren't they? That should be entertaining.)

I am not understanding the joke.