Golden Path and Pit of Success (family hub)
Design tools so the easiest, most natural way of doing things automatically yields the best results — performance, security, quality. Gravity over grit (Good defaults — the user’s original message).
Split into two concept notes, one per altitude:
- Pit of Success — the API/language-design property: correct usage requires no effort; the lazy call is the right call. Origin: Rico Mariani (.NET); popularized by Atwood. GC as designing-out the pit of despair.
- Golden Path — the platform-engineering property: the paved, supported default route at org scale. Red Hat definition; Backstage as canonical implementation.
Shared captures: CodingHorror (Atwood) · Rico Mariani (origin, wayback-recovered) · PragmaticDX (gravity over grit) · Red Hat (golden paths).
Shared thesis: defaults are load-bearing — a system needing heroic effort or endless wikis to be used correctly is fragile by construction.