[dcx]

What a useful idea to coin a term for! I've seen a huge amount of sweat go into edge case functionality over the years, especially in large systems. I wonder exactly how much you could get away with not doing, if you had good insight into user behavior and applied this philosophy liberally and brutally.

But I'm also a bit skeptical about how far you can push the idea beyond the kinds of design tradeoffs people already make. It's often hard to be certain about which edge cases will prove to be important or valuable in the future, and when you cut this sort of corner, changing your mind later can sometimes be very, very expensive (e.g.: I've experienced the pure agony that comes with migrating away from ancient mainframes, which handled every single edge case in plaintext). Not to mention that in large systems, every tiny edge case ends up being useful to a huge number of people anyway.

Perhaps this term is helpful in the same way that "technical debt" is: it encodes a framing that the desire for hygiene or completeness should be balanced thoughtfully in terms of user benefit and added complexity.