Don't delete to fix

/log/2025/02/26

If you are a developer, you are annoyed by this. If you are a user, you were most likely guilty of this. I am talking reporting that something is broken, AND deleting it.

This happened to me too many times: User experiences a bug with an object. Their first instinct is to delete it, and create a new one. They report it. I cannot reproduce and fix it.

If you have a car and it stops working, you don’t throw it in the trash and then call the service to fix it. But when it comes to software, which has virtually zero cost of creation, this behavior somehow becomes widespread.

This is similar to other user behavior like smashing the mouse and keys when a computer gets stuck. It is physically impossible for such an action to speed up a digital process, but many of us instinctively do it.1 Deleting to fix is a similar behavior, which I suspect got ingrained by crappy Microsoft software. The default way of fixing Windows machines is to “format the disk”, and reinstalling Windows. Nobody asks, “why do I have to start from scratch?”. The “End User” deletes to fix by default, because the End User does not understand. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

The concept of “Mechanical Sympathy” is relevant: having an understanding of how a tool works, being able to feel inside the box. We can extend this to “Developer Sympathy”: having an understanding of how a software was developed, how it changes over time, how it can break, how it can be fixed.

Any troubleshooting must be done in a non-destructive way. When a user deletes an object, two things can happen: it is hard-deleted, which makes the issue impossible to reproduce. If it is instead soft-deleted, it might be restored, but developers will mostly not bother, depending on the issue.

The users cannot be expected to care either. Their time is valuable. They deserve things that “just work”. So we need to come up with other workarounds:

  • Everything should be soft-deleted by default in non-sensitive contexts, and should be easy to restore.
  • Any reporting form should include instructions to warn the user against deleting.
  • Even better, the reporting should happen through an internal system, and should automatically block deletion once a ticket is created.

  1. I can’t remember the name of this inequality or find it online, please comment on the Hacker News thread if you know what it’s called. ↩