Oh I 100% agree with you.. though I think you're missing "you fucked up". My point is more just that people mess up and blur the lines accidentally either throwing exceptions which get propagated up as internal service errors when they should actually get run across the wire as business logic errors as part of you fucked up. Or really they didn't guard their code correctly and you get we fucked up when you really meant say overloaded.

And it does start getting really blurry when you get into you fucked up. Or you are fucking up so hard that we fucked up and in fact our fucking up everybody else.

HTTP error codes, the short version:

  2xx:  here you go
  3xx:  you go here
  4xx:  you fucked up
  5xx:  I fucked up

(not mine, stolen from I-can't-remember-where)

400 You Fucked Up aka "What are you talking about?"

aah missed it, I was cooking dinner. 100% agreed.

Originally I had them in random order and then I sorted them to try to make it easier for people to guess the status code from the colloquial description :)

which one is teapot?

You can’t prove the teapot exists, or does not exist, so does it really matter?

And status 418 is only legal on April 1 in countries that celebrate April Fool’s Day. You can just turn your servers off for the day and not answer requests.

That seems like a very reasonable hedge against uncertainty. I will bake it into our sla/slo.