Over the last few years, I have been lucky enough to work on systems of vast ambition and complexity. If I were to distill all of my learnings into a single principle, it would be this:

The validation burden of a software project is commensurate to its complexity.

This is not a controversial statement. On the surface, it is not insightful, not interesting, and is unlikely to generate much argument.

But, there is one corollary which ignites incendiary disagreement from people both smarter and more experienced than I am. Nonetheless, it is my opinion that this statement follows from the commensurate complexity principle, and that it is true:

Commensurate validation is sufficient to ship systems of arbitrary complexity.

This is my annual “hot take”.