How Bad Can Code Get? There's No Limit, Says Zach Kehs
Zach Kehs argues software has no physical constraint analogous to a building collapsing, so codebases can keep accumulating indirection and performance loss indefinitely unless someone actively stops it.
What it is
A blog post by Zach Kehs, quoted by Simon Willison, making the case that code quality has no natural floor the way physical structures do.
What it does
It draws a direct comparison between adding floors to a building, which eventually collapses under its own weight, and adding layers of indirection to software, which has no equivalent physical failure mode and can degrade indefinitely.
Why it matters
Unlike physical engineering where entropy imposes a hard limit, software degradation is unbounded and only stops when a team deliberately intervenes, a useful framing for arguing for refactoring time or tech-debt paydown against feature pressure.
The ROI Math on Reverse-Engineering Your Smart Home Just Flipped
Simon Willison observes that coding agents have lowered the cost of reverse-engineering and automating undocumented home devices enough to change the underlying ROI calculation.
One Endpoint, Many Backends: OpenRouter's Fallback Feature Has a Catch
OpenRouter's automatic fallback routing can send identical requests to different backend providers running different serving software, producing inconsistent outputs for the same model name.
re.match() Isn't Gone, Just Officially Discouraged in Python 3.15
Python 3.15 soft-deprecates re.match(), marking it as discouraged for new code without any plan to remove it, in favor of a clearer alternative.