Around industrial machines, I've long held and promoted the view that the machine is _trying_ to kill you, _trying_ to damage itself, _trying_ to ruin the workpiece. Only by outsmarting it at every turn, and having safeguards against every mishap, can you go home at the end of the day.

When something happens despite all that, just step back and realize how much worse it could've been, and how successful your safeguards have been up 'til that point.

Then look carefully at the procedure. Is there something about the naming or structure that could be more clear? Can you think of near-misses that resemble the failure you just experienced? Are you using boobytraps in production? Symlinks and overlay filesystems seem clever in the moment but they're bound to subvert our intuition someday. Perhaps you should get in the habit of always using full absolute paths, for instance.

There's always another gotcha, but if your workflow doesn't look as over-the-top safety-silly as aerospace, you're not doing as much as you could be. (Hint: It's not silly.)