what seems to be lacking from these discussions is the notino that forethought and consideration can win the day. if there is some brain fart, and its tracked

what seems to be lacking from these discussions is the notino that forethought and consideration can win the day. if there is some brain fart, and its tracked down and fixed, the value of encoding that in a unit to be run until heat death. as you say, exactly zero. but if there is a problem area that keeps throwing bugs like a metastatic tumor - say race conditions or memory footprint, or unicode handling. in that case the return on writing tests to try to shake out those areas is pretty high. I think the real failure here is to try to substitute informed judgement calls and meaningful discussion with simple checklists of dos and donts.