I was aghast when I first started to see dependency management tooling that allowed dependency versions to be declared using a wildcard. That seemed like an insane compromise between convenience and safety.

I couldn’t bring myself to use a wildcard for a long time. I always specified the exact version and incremented manually to feel like I was at least trying to maintain control.

I still think it’s an insane practice, but with software engineering ever increasingly being the art of composing dependencies with bits of glue code, I get it.