[Spivak]

I mean after a certain point you just have to accept the kinds of things that your users will type in whatever text boxes you show them and make it work. If you know what the user is trying to do then it's not good UX to throw an error or tell them "I know you're trying to search, but I won't until you retype it into this other box".

Google Maps is a good example of this. Like the original text box you were shown was searching for an address but enough people typed business search terms that eventually they just implemented that feature.

The Ansible vault is a bad example of this. They have a little command `ansible-vault` that lets you manage encrypted files and strings. If you run `ansible-vault edit ./nonexistent_file` it tells you that you meant `ansible-vault create` and vice versa but doesn't just do it despite the user intent being clear. This ultimately lead me to just patching it to do the right thing.

[awj]

> The Ansible vault is a bad example of this. They have a little command `ansible-vault` that lets you manage encrypted files and strings. If you run `ansible-vault edit ./nonexistent_file` it tells you that you meant `ansible-vault create` and vice versa but doesn't just do it despite the user intent being clear. This ultimately lead me to just patching it to do the right thing.

IMO it's a bit much to decide what "the right thing" is there. Blindly assuming that someone attempting to edit credentials didn't mistype a file name isn't exactly safe and sounds like a great way to cause problems based on believing you updated something you did not in fact update.

[danudey]

That was my first thought as well. This is going to lead to people typo'ing, opening a blank file, being confused that their credentials are gone, and then adding in the updated credentials in the wrong place.