Explicit actions imply intent, prefer implicit actions
Software development (as well as many things in life) is all about making choices, one of them is deciding whether to do things in an implicit or explicit way.
Generally (based on my personal experience) the explicit option is the one that people recommend taking because it doesn’t require knowledge of the implicit behaviour and is more likely to be forward compatible.
For example, this could be when specifying arguments to a function, cli, etc. specifying the same values as the default values even though not specifying that argument at all would result in the same behaviour. Or in expressions, adding brackets for precedence even though it is not needed:
// Here the brackets are superfluous
bool perform_action = (timestamp == current_time) ? object.has_changed() : timestamp == 0;
However, I believe that expressing things implicitly would be better in many of these cases because when expressing things explicitly an intent is implied: it is implied there is a reason why the thing in question is defined explicitly. “Why would someone go out of their way to do something?”.
I believe that this implied intent can lead to confusion. For example it can make someone believe the default is not what it is, or the operator precedence is not in the order it actually is and as a result, the implicit option is preferable in some if not most of these cases.
Additionally, the implicit option also saves time when developing.
If for some reason, the implicit way is not clear enough, documentation (mainly through comments) I believe is a better solution than bearing this implied intent and in the case of forward compatibility, often the new default is what you want; if not, upgrading is usually trivial.
To conclude, in software development clarity is something that we want to maximise, and I believe that more often than people think doing things implicitly is the way to go about that.
Although this post was written in the context of software development the implied intent of being explicit also applies to different areas of life.