Datasette

It's not just numbers pretending to be text. SQLite also accepts a column declared with a type it's never heard of, like DATETIME, JSON, or a typo such as BLOBB, no questions asked. Evan Hahn's fix is one word: STRICT.

In the thread, an engineer traced a real data-corruption bug back to exactly this looseness: a UUID silently turned into the wrong number, caught only after rebuilding the table under STRICT.

Her claim is blunt: code is now a materialized view of understanding, useful while current and disposable when stale, the same way servers became cattle instead of pets. The resistance to throwing it away, she says, is an evaluation problem, not a code problem.

Not everyone in the thread bought it. Several read it as a meandering restatement of an old truth, and one engineer pointed out the new pain: with every coworker now filing polished PRs, it's suddenly impossible to tell who actually understands the system.