Lessons from Scale #10: Failure Is a First-Class API

Failure is not an edge case. At scale, systems fail constantly: dependencies time out partial work succeeds retries collide state drifts networks lie The real problem isn’t that things break. It’s that most systems pretend failure is exceptional — and act surprised when it happens. That pretense is where humans sneak back in. Where humans appear Across this series, humans show up in the same…