Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also does super defensive coding. Not that it's a bad thing in general, but I write a lot of prototype code.
Production quality code is defensive. Probably trained on a lot of google code.
But I've heard "defensive code" used for the kind of code where almost every method validates its input parameters, wraps everything in a try-catch, returns nonsensical default values in failure scenarios, etc. This is a complete waste because the caller won't know what to do with the failed validations or thrown errors, and it's just unnecessary bloat that obfuscates the business logic. Validation, error handling and so on should be done in specific parts of the codebase (bonus points if you can encode the successful validation or the presence/absence of errors in the type system).