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What would the difference be if they had enforced no unwraps/expects/slicing and instead logged the error and returned a 500?

As the user, I can't tell the difference, but it might have sped up their recovery a bit.

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You could argue that explicitly writing down the assumption would make it clearer to yourself and your reviewer that it might be overly optimistic.

Pretty much - the time spent ruling out the hypothesis that it was a cyberattack would have been time spent investigating the uptick in deliberately written error logs, since you would expect alerts to be triggered if those exceed a threshold.

I imagine it would also require less time debugging a panic. That kind of breadcrumb trail in your logs is a gift to the future engineer and also customers who see a shorter period of downtime.

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