Hyrum's Law

Hyrum's law states that with a sufficient number of users of an interface, every observable behaviour of that interface will be depended upon by somebody, regardless of what the interface's contract promises. The observation, attributed to a Google engineer named Hyrum Wright, does not distinguish between behaviour a specification documents and behaviour that merely happens to be true of one implementation — error wording, iteration order, timing, even outright bugs. Enough callers, and all of it becomes load-bearing.

This makes "it was never part of the documented contract" a weak defence when a change breaks someone. The claim is often true and beside the point: Documentation Rot means the written contract rarely covers every observable property, and a caller who noticed a convenient regularity has no way to know whether it was intentional. Removing an undocumented behaviour is not obviously safer than removing a documented one; it is only less defensible, because the maintainer can point to a specification and call the breakage someone else's mistake. The underlying fault is the kind Chesterton's Fence warns against — a change made without knowing what depends on the thing removed produces a Regression that looks unrelated to its cause. Catching the dependency in Code Review, or tracing a Root Cause Analysis back to the exact caller, is far cheaper than discovering it in production.

Versioning schemes exist partly to manage this. A Semantic Versioning major bump signals that behaviour, documented or not, may change, and a Deprecation window gives dependents time to notice and adjust before it does. Neither eliminates Hyrum's law — a minor version can still break someone who relied on accidental behaviour — but both convert a Silent Failure into an announced one, which is the most a maintainer can reasonably offer.