Explaining tech debt is, the evidence would suggest, impossible:
Like many I’ve seen archaic systems where something that should take an hour might take a week. The trouble, as anyone who’s ever been in this situation can attest to, is that non-technical managers invariably fail to understand the problem.
Of course the standard claim at this point is that engineers are just bad at communicating. They simply need to re-express their ideas around refactoring etc. in terms of ‘value to the business’ or some such. But I’ve never seen this work. Instead I’ve seen the same thing over and over: people who understand complex systems also understand the importance of minimising that complexity wherever possible; people who have never understood a complex system in their life never ever grasp this and cannot be convinced.
Imagine you’re a dumb non-technical manager. You think coding is basically magic. Sometimes when you ask the engineers to add a feature (which is like casting a spell), they give some weird story about how they could cast the spell quickly, but it’s better to do so slowly to prevent their magic becoming impotent and making future spells take longer. This is obviously unconvincing; it sounds like something slackers would say. So why are we surprised when managers who think like this fail to grasp the importance of controlling tech debt?
People who focus on receiving trust from authority have less attention available to learn engineering. People who focus on technical craft have less attention available to learn how to gain trust from authority. Thus the managers (in my experience) are always technically clueless.
Hackernews recently had a discussion comparing personal coding projects to the Winchester Mystery House.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601194
This links primarily to :
https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/03/26/winchester-mystery-house.html
But crucially in that discussion, “mrandish” mentions Bill Atkinson’s “negative lines of code.”
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
Bill Atkinson clearly worked to reduce complexity without reducing functionality.
Also in this discussion, some interesting projects are mentioned, such as “Gastown,” which reminds me of “Bartertown” from Mad Max.
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04
Not if their jobs, power, and status depend on complexity.
He is almost certainly wrong on LLM keeping the verbal lawns shapely.
For one, let’s remember that more powerful computers did not help to write and optimize a better code, but rather allowed greater inefficiency. Thus lowering standards for software to the levels that would be considered absurd but a few years earlier. The Daily WTF found IIRC embedded Java machines whose only purpose was to perform simple arithmetic operations with string constants.
So instead it’s one more way so-called AI ends up as a «force multiplier for stupidity».
LLM can navigate and parse a vast, ever-growing mess? Great! The pointy-haired bosses can and will use it this way. And continue not caring about growth of the contradictory mess. But GIGO principle, of course, still stands. And all data going in (semi-articulate requests and cancerous databank) is mostly garbage.
The inevitable result: LLM used as a black box oracular tool with pseudorandom input.
Lucklucky says:
If Parkinson’s Laws remain part of the context, some tool is not going to make them disappear in a puff of logic smoke, yes.
T. Beholder: “For one, let’s remember that more powerful computers did not help to write and optimize a better code, but rather allowed greater inefficiency. Thus lowering standards for software to the levels that would be considered absurd but a few years earlier. The Daily WTF found IIRC embedded Java machines whose only purpose was to perform simple arithmetic operations with string constants.”
The objective functions of that code were and are: (a) something that looks like it works (and mostly does), (b) job security, and (c) rational apathy.
LLMs now provide (a) and (c) to goyim in abundance.
Jim says:
It also provides (b) to some of the Pointy Haired Bosses, if as a mixed blessing.
In that the big downside is having much fewer subordinates involved in BS production, but the upside is perfect excuse for a purge and then having much fewer potential backstabbers.