The Ick.

Any engineer knows to listen to their intuition. I know I can point to a method in IDE or a line on an Excalidraw diagram and say to my friend “I can’t articulate it, but this spot gives me an ick”, and after staring there for 10 seconds they will nod “I know what you mean”. It is important, of course, to not trust it blindly, but to try and figure out exactly what is your 6th sense is hinting at. Most often it is a tech debt risk, a race condition, a probable edge case. Lately I’ve been getting one particular ick, and it’s been a challenge to diagnose and give it a coherent definition. What I have cooked up so far: “Do not write algorithm to control the human, but to be controlled by the human.” Sometimes, what your intuition hints at has nothing to do with the code quality. I’ll try to sell you both ethics and shaky speculative math of it. Software engineering is glorified plumbing: directing, splitting and joining data flows, and as such any considerations of ethics come to it as an