I would think that the first rule of API design is to use it yourself whilst wearing the customers' shoes, and with that approach a large proportion of cases like that would become apparent. Or one could look at some of the longest-standing APIs (WindowS API is one) out there and observe how they evolve it to cope this requirements changes. There's still some chicken-and-egg situation in there but much of the ambiguity can be resolved with the right technique.

The REAL problem is we have all these startup turds churning out ideas faster than they can think about them, and the HN crowd has built an entire ecosystem to facilitate that churn