Hanlon's Razor
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Hanlon's Razor: 'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.' That teammate who merged broken code didn't do it on purpose — they just didn't test properly. Most code sins come from ignorance, not evil intent.
Real Talk
A philosophical principle applied to software teams: 'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence (or ignorance).' Applied to debugging, code review, and incident response, it promotes assuming positive intent — that issues stem from mistakes, complexity, or misunderstanding rather than deliberate sabotage.
When You'll Hear This
"The junior broke production — Hanlon's Razor says it was an honest mistake, not sabotage." / "Apply Hanlon's Razor in code reviews: that terrible code was probably written under time pressure, not malice."
Related Terms
Code Review
A code review is when another developer reads your code before it gets merged, looking for bugs, bad practices, or anything confusing.
Incident Response
Incident Response is the process your team follows when production breaks. Who gets paged? Who's the incident commander?
Postmortem
A Postmortem is the meeting you have after an incident to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.