footgun
by extension, generalised from (1.): An opportunity or object that allows the unfortunate to mostly figuratively but sometimes literally shoot themselves in the foot.
Definitions
by extension, generalised from (1.): An opportunity or object that allows the unfortunate to mostly figuratively but sometimes literally shoot themselves in the foot. A less obvious footgun may be a pitfall (1.).
If it is what Douglas Crockford might call a “footgun,” then at the very least, condoning and standardizing the “footwounds” will make problems easier to search for and fix.
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(programming, _, slang, humorous, derogatory) Any feature likely to lead to the programmer or user shooting themselves in the foot.
This is a footgun! ES6 should have specified that it either fulfills, rejects, or just throws some sort of synchronous error. Unfortunately, because of precedence in Promise libraries predating ES6 Promise, they had to leave this gotcha …
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(idiomatic) To shoot oneself in the foot.
“The main footgun here is the conflicting instructions throughout. You can push an LLM towards less strong language patterns by telling it things like "do not hallucinate" or whatever, and on its own it may actually help, but this prompt is nonsense.”
“The main footgun here is the conflicting instructions throughout. You can push an LLM towards less strong language patterns by telling it things like "do not hallucinate" or whatever, and on its own it may actually help, but this prompt is nonsense.”
— Bluesky· May 2026
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