[TheCleric]

Any doesn't mean "doesn't care". Any means "YOLO, do whatever you want, I'm one of those cool parents who'll let you smoke and drink beer."

[eyelidlessness]

What is the distinction?

[TheCleric]

The distinction is just because you "don't care" about the values right now, nothing stops the next developer (including future you) from needing the values.

So now you've gone from not caring to "enabling someone to shoot themselves in the foot" if they don't read the types of the parameters carefully. That's the difference.

[eyelidlessness]

The case I was trying to convey doesn’t narrow the actual type for anything outside its own function body. Any footgun that exists after the function call already existed before it. It just implies “I’m only looking at your keys not your values”.

[consilient]

> It just implies “I’m only looking at your keys not your values”.

That's what `unknown` is for. `any` behaves like `never` (in covariant positions), which is exactly the opposite.

[eyelidlessness]

I don’t think that’s how `any` behaves in any position, but I’d be happy to be corrected. Please show me how `any` is treated as `never`.

[consilient]

Here's a close to minimal example:

    const anyToNeverHelper = <T,>(t: any): number & T => t
    const absurd: never = anyToNeverHelper<never>(0)

[TheCleric]

I gathered what you meant. My point is what stops the next developer working on your codebase from adding code in the body of your function that accesses the values of the object in an unsafe way?

[eyelidlessness]

A bit of trust. I’m not aware of a type system that protects my coworkers from my bad decisions, only those humans do that.