> It almost sounds like you are advocating a style of code ownership where programmers shouldn't make changes to other's code without talking to them. Sure, we

> It almost sounds like you are advocating a style of code ownership where programmers shouldn't make changes to other's code without talking to them. Sure, we could say there should be more tests, or people should run them. We can say there should be issues filed before you refactor things. We can try to introduce all sorts of processes for avoiding mistakes. And we'd be right. But it's also nice to talk to a human, even if just casually. I don't want to say "shouldn't X without Y" because then "shouldn't make changes to other's code without talking to them" is much the same thing as "shouldn't make changes without running existing tests" and "shouldn't check changes in without submitting tests that the code fixes." Shoulds and shouldn'ts should always be secondary to talking.