Test your approach at extreme scales to find what breaks and what surprisingly survives.

Core principle: Extremes expose fundamental truths hidden at normal scales.

Normal scale: "Handle errors when they occur" works fine At 1B scale: Error volume overwhelms logging, crashes system Reveals: Need to make errors impossible (type systems) or expect them (chaos engineering)

Normal scale: Direct function calls work At global scale: Network latency makes synchronous calls unusable Reveals: Async/messaging becomes survival requirement, not optimization

Normal duration: Works for hours/days At years: Memory grows unbounded, eventual crash Reveals: Need persistence or periodic cleanup, can't rely on memory