[visionscaper]

With defensive coding I indeed meant defensive programming. You always want to fail fast (faster also means that you can fix more bugs), but this is often interpreted as "fail hard": no prevention or mitigation what so ever. In this sense I meant it is the opposite of defensive programming.

What I notice is that developers who also have a background in statically typed (system) languages, are much more disciplined when it comes to defensive programming and logging/error handling. (I'm afraid this also correlates with age).

BTW, I like your description, "designing systems to make fewer assumptions", for defensive programming!