Poka-yoke

This seems like an interesting and useful process design concept on one hand, and on the other hand, it also sounds like a Japanese buzzword for foolproofing (in fact, the article notes that the term was originally “baka-yoke”, which is literally “foolproof” or “idiot-proof”). On the one hand, I don’t think Toyota invented the concept of foolproofing; on the other hand, giving it a cool buzzword gives you an excuse to talk about it, which means you’re more likely to…

Slightly different to what is described here, but one of my pet peeves is the "nuclear button" features that devs put in their software - ie easy to activate features that add marginal utility to specific niche workflows but cause irreversible damage to everyone else. Firefox deleting every single one of your pinned tabs on close if you have a second window open is an example of this, as is YouTube jumping to a different part of the video every…

In my industry, we mostly use the term to refer to mechanical features, typically keyways, that prevent connectors from being mated incorrectly. Suppose you have a module with 50 pins worth of connectors, but because some of the signals are in different harnesses which get installed at different times, you can't just use a 50-pin connector. For this example let's say it's sensible to break it up as 20+20+10. You wouldn't use two identical 20-pin connectors since they carry different…

Designing infrastructure and processes to reduce human error is a very important topic. With the recent AI boom, many engineers are working on figuring out how to build infrastructure that reduces AI errors. We rediscover many techniques (eg writing good specs) that were once used for humans, but then abandoned.