Except of course smartphones

It strikes me that this is most likely to be used as part of an exfiltration mechanism for a malicious JS package or similar.

Try reading it as "muggle specs" - specifications which the majority of the population will read.

"INSERT only, no UPDATEs" - sounds like event sourcing?

Or an append only log. Either way, not things unheard of in software engineering.

Obvious in hind sight.

Fowler's Event Sourcing [2005] https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html

Published after I stumbled onto my solution.

I don't always run the code in my head exactly - i do something more important, which is consider the set of possible situations the code can be in, and look for problems.

with filter splitters being a thing now, I think they would be, yes.

Which is why best practice is now to start with CI in production - it needs limited access to dev, and the access from development environments into it can be literally just enough to collect the latest artifact.

For your average consumer, this is probably a bad thing.

we ask almost everyone the same thing, which can be resolved to one of the unimaginative but straightforward things above, but is not necessarily obvious at first glance. We fail the people who evidently can't code, not the people who fail to resolve it to the magic answer.

hmmm, about this not having to pay rent - prisoners with partners and children currently can't pay their chunk of the rent, but I bet many would, if they could.