How do I stop missing tradeoffs in my system designs?

Discovering the tradeoff you missed only once it is live and hard to change is one of the most humbling parts of this work. But notice what is really happening: you are learning the true cost of decisions the only way anyone truly learns it, by living with them. That sting is not failure. It is the tuition that turns a designer into a good one. You will never foresee every tradeoff, so aim instead to make your designs easier to change when you are wrong. Favor choices you can reverse. Keep the risky, hard-to-undo decisions small and late. When you must commit to something expensive to change, that is the moment to slow down, write out the options, and pull in other people to poke holes before it ships. Cheap mistakes are the goal, not zero mistakes. Start keeping a running list of the tradeoffs that bit you. Over time it becomes a checklist that your future self runs designs against, and the same class of surprise stops catching you twice. The engineers who seem to see everything are mostly just people who have been burned before and remembered. Let each miss teach you, and your foresight will grow with your scars.