I’m not a programmer, just a user. But I often notice… things.

Here’s how I’m reading that example: the customer assumed that the “core product” was a given, the devs assumed that the “boring, basic features” weren’t so important, and both assumed to be on the same page, when they weren’t.

Then you got the devs assuming a bunch of potential issues that the client might get in the future, and assumed that it was their job to address them, creating the “imaginary problems”.

I might be wrong so don’t trust me too much, but are you noticing the pattern? Assumers, assumers, assumers everywhere. Always that failure to ask yourself that one tiny question, “do I know this?”.

That fits rather well my grievances (as a user) with software. A lot of times, they boil down to “someone assumed a specific user case, and the assumption was wrong”. Because that’s what happens with assumptions - they are often wrong.

And it also fits the nature of the imaginary problems; they’re usually “what if?” scenarios taken for granted.

Because of that I wonder if “the trunk are imaginary problems, the root are assumptions” wouldn’t be a better analogy.

Speaking on Lemmy I think that the issue here is different. It’s less about imaginary problems or assumptions, and simply about how many dev hours two devs can reasonably pour into a piece of software, to get it polished enough in comparison with a 18yo competitor.