Whoever built the fence should have put a sign on it saying why.
Oh, and integration tests to check that the problem doesn't recur when the fence is replaced.
Oh, and integration tests to check that the problem doesn't recur when the fence is replaced.
It's hard to predict what parts of shared understanding we have today is going to be scarce tomorrow. And one can't serialize _all_ of that current shared understanding in documents and integration tests.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/co...
Of course, the much more obvious flaw of Chesterton’s Fence is that it trivially reduces to status quo bias.
It doesn’t provide any guidance on how much research is necessary before removing any specific fence. The most charitable interpretation is “don’t remove a fence until you do a sufficient amount of research into why the fence was built,” which is tautological and useless.