My neighborhood has a number of friendly outdoor cats. Id say at least half of them will run up to me and let me pet them

Yes please. Many times when I add a feature I end up refactoring some of the code first to better accommodate it.

Are there any good strategies for avoiding painful upgrades?

If you’re not already doing so, hold design reviews with your users. Breaking API changes should be communicated early and in a way that makes it clear how the users benefit from the change. If the users don’t benefit, you should reconsider why you’re making changes in the first place.

My black cat does the same thing when she wants her tummy rubbed.

While this looks like a handy tool, it does make me think shell scripting itself needs a cleaner approach than what we have currently.

If you got rid of those books you’d have more room for cats

Sometimes it’s easier to try a new idea in a new language (e.g. the borrow checker in Rust) rather than trying to shoehorn it into an existing language.

Same here! Testing up front has made it extremely rare that I have to go back with a debugger later.

I like this, but I’d drop the special election in favor of disqualifying candidates who would age out during their term.