I've been trying to think of a micro-example from some refactoring I've been doing lately.
Long ago somebody made a Thingy.find(...) method where you can pass all sorts of optional arguments to filter which Thingy comes back, like Thingy.find(primary_key=1) or Thingy.find(owner=123, active=true) etc. That complexity made it flexible for people writing caller-code, because they wouldn't need to alter the method to satisfy their future arbitrary needs, they can just pass whatever key-values they want to match.
However now some original invariants have changed, and now I need to go find all the places it's being used ("flexibly") and reconstruct the caller's intent, because in some scenarios the correct return value is going to be a list of multiple results instead of 0-or-1.
In contrast, the task would be easier if there was a named method that captured the intent for the 3-4 distinct use-cases.
Long ago somebody made a Thingy.find(...) method where you can pass all sorts of optional arguments to filter which Thingy comes back, like Thingy.find(primary_key=1) or Thingy.find(owner=123, active=true) etc. That complexity made it flexible for people writing caller-code, because they wouldn't need to alter the method to satisfy their future arbitrary needs, they can just pass whatever key-values they want to match.
However now some original invariants have changed, and now I need to go find all the places it's being used ("flexibly") and reconstruct the caller's intent, because in some scenarios the correct return value is going to be a list of multiple results instead of 0-or-1.
In contrast, the task would be easier if there was a named method that captured the intent for the 3-4 distinct use-cases.