[ansgri]

This is a very good analogy. And this interest rate can probably be significantly reduced by applying TDD and reducing the size of isolated subsystems. That may start to look like microservices. I generally don’t like both for traditional development, but current LLMs both make them easier and more useful.

And the “rule of three” basically ceases to be applicable between components — either the code has localized impact, or is a part of rock-solid foundational library. Intermediate cases just explode the refactoring complexity.