[IX-103]

If you've never seen good developers bork their local environments then you clearly haven't worked on a large enough and complex enough project.

I worked on a large project that needed to support development on many platforms. The amount of scripting for the git hooks and build hooks alone required its own development team. When subtly incompatible changes in git hooks rolled out, you would see a few people that ran commands in just the wrong way to bork their repository. These commands are usually fine, but when combined with an otherwise invisible change in the hooks, would just break things. Now the actual breakage rate was low, like 1 in 1000 in a given month, but with as many developers as were working on this project that was always a couple of people that had to nuke their local repo from orbit (it's the only way to be sure).

[acdha]

Note that I’m specifically referring to breaking it in a way which is significantly harder to recover from than rerunning a known setup process (Simon’s comparison to a cloud environment where you could reset it on-demand). It’s not about never making mistakes, it’s about having a good conceptual understanding and habits around configuration management.