[Kinrany]

> In my mind standardisation is how we really solve problems in much of software development.

I've been having this thought very often lately.

The only way for humans to do something faster is to use a machine. Any machine is built on some assumption that something is repeatedly true, that some things can be repeatedly interacted with in the same way.

Finding true invariants is very hard, but our world is increasingly malleable. Over time it is getting easier to invent new invariants and pad things out so that the invariant holds.

[akiselev]

It's true not just for machines but engineering in general. Whether it's civil or mechanical or electronic or semiconductor engineering, their foundation is built on setting boundary conditions to make the natural world predictable so that it can be reliably manipulated. Things most often go wrong when those conditions are poorly understood, constrained, or modeled such as when using an unproven material, using imprecise parts, or ignoring thermal expansion when designing structural components.

Engineers have a plethora of quality control standards and centuries of built up knowledge to make this chaos manageable and the problems tractable.