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by nonethewiser 1454 days ago
What do we do when software gets too complex?

We redesign and start over.

That may or may not be an option with government. If it's not, we know the consequences. Paralysis.

I remember a musing Elon Musk had on Lex Friedman's podcast. He noted that there was no cleansing function for laws. Something like that might be a step in the right direction.

2 comments

Frequently people forget what happens when they do that. People love refactoring... but forget how that spaghetti got there in the first place.

Spoiler alert: it's because life is messy and doesn't fit neatly into buckets & code. You throw out so much testing bug fixing & corner case fixes.

For every reg that is abused by bad actors, there's a dozen that are written in blood.

> We redesign and start over.

I feel like its better to do greenfield development and migrate.