Ounce of Prevention
Noun Phrase · Slang & Abbreviations
Definitions
A proverb-style reminder that a little preventive work can save a lot of later pain. In engineering slang, it usually gets invoked when someone is arguing for tests, docs, automation, or guardrails before disaster makes the case more expensively.
In plain English: A reminder that small preventive work now can avoid much bigger problems later.
Example: "The on-call lead framed the alert cleanup as an ounce of prevention, because one hour of tuning now could save many more hours of noise during the next real incident."