AWS does this for a few irreversible deletes

AWS is so strangely inconsistent about this. In some places it is "delete", others "permanently delete", and others still it is the name of the resource. Thinking about it more, keeping the user on their toes like that makes it less likely to fat-finger a deletion, I suppose.

Came here to mention that UI option. At an old job, some of the internal tools made you add a flag "--I-am-not-a-moran[sic]-I-know-what-I-do" or "--sudo-make-me-a-sandwich" to important operations, presumably to remind you of their impact and give you a moment of typing to think about it.

> Something about typing that makes people’s brains fully activate, I think.

Part of it might be that, but I think it’s also about the previous experiences that people have with programs. How much a person thinks about something is inversely proportional to how much they see it. Typing is just something not many companies have added, so seeing it is off-putting and makes people think.

If you had to type “Permanently Delete This” all day to delete random entries in a database, you wouldn’t think twice before you accidentally deleted all of production.

This is why having the same warning for two different severities is a big problem. People encounter the first and realize it isn’t a big deal, and then glaze through the second because of their previous experience. Deleting an empty folder is fine, but deleting your home directory might not be, even if both are just “deleting a folder”.