Hyrum’s law states:
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviours of your system will be depended on somebody
- We cannot assume perfect adherence to published contracts or best practices.
- You can think of it as the concept of entropy in physics
- writing code that works vs writing code that works indefinitely
References
See also
- Scale and Efficiency applies to people, compute and codebase — Hyrum’s Law is why scale makes API contracts harder: more users means more accidental dependents
- Style Guides and Rules — one response to Hyrum’s Law: enforce consistency so that observable behaviour is intentional, not accidental
- Documentation Is Not a Wiki — It Lives and Evolves With the Code — another response: document what the contract actually is, so users depend on the right things