Someone on your team says "it works" and there's a moment of relief, maybe even satisfaction. The deploy went out. The bug is gone. The new feature is up. Whatever they were wrestling with, it works. It's worth pausing on that phrase, because "it works" is doing a lot of hidden work itself. Working software is genuinely valuable — much better to have something that does the thing than something that doesn't. But "works" is a weak property when you don't have the others next to it. Reliable. Robust. Predictable. Dependable. Tested. Each of those is something stronger than "I ran it just now and it didn't break." Each of them is a claim about what the software will keep doing, under variation, under load, under change, when nobody is watching. When you have the observation without those properties, what you have is software that werks . It sounds the same as "works" when you say it out loud. It'll pass casual inspection, it'll satisfy the demo, it'll close the ticket.…