[kodablah]

> If you dont have analytics you are flying blind

More like flying based on your knowledge as a pilot and not by the whims of your passengers.

For many CLIs and developer tooling, principled decisions need to reign. Accepting the unquantifiability of usage in a principled product is often difficult for those that are not the target demographic, but for developer tools specifically (be they programming languages, CLIs, APIs, SDKs, etc), cohesion and common sense are usually enough. It also seems real hard for product teams to accept the value of the status quo with these existing, heavily used tools.

[mckn1ght]

Actually it's more like flying in the clouds with no instruments which can lead to spatial disorientation when you exit the cloud cover and realize you're nosediving towards the earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_disorientation

Flying based on the whims of your passengers would be user testing/interviewing, which is a complementary, and IMO necessary, strategy alongside analytics.