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> It might be as simple as figuring out where the permissions/role check will go and including a "# Future permissions check will go here" comment.

Very good point. I was thinking about this issue not too long ago. And the ability to do that, comes with experience and often separates normal programmers from much better programmers.

It also takes a while to detect this, because there needs to be enough "Futures" that become present to tell if the original architect predicted or foresaw or did they just over-abstract or and overloaded the code with potential apis or features.

More often than not I see the later. "This code never runs","why is this here","we have 4 levels of abstraction for this, why?". "Oh because I thought we'd have this and that in the future so I added in".

Quite rarely I see the former. When a developer is asked "can we add this?" they come back and say "yes easily, I knew you'd come and ask for this so I added the abstraction to handle it or add stuff to it later". The one thing I noticed is that this becomes a pattern for people. Some people create the former type software some the later.




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