Unwritten requirements are a silent killer in engineering projects. Using a concrete example of wooden craft spools — one concentric and usable as a mechanical drum, one warped and unusable — the post illustrates how implementation trade-offs that are externally visible must be surfaced to customers rather than decided unilaterally by implementers. The key argument: it is impossible to fully specify any non-trivial engineering project in advance, so when new requirements emerge or trade-offs arise during design, they should be communicated and decided collaboratively. The post also touches on how iterative feedback between contractors and customers leads to better requirement discovery than one-way specification documents.
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