Quoting Zach Kehs
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison
Zach Kehs says software can always get worse. Unlike a building, code has no hard limit on bad layers and slowdown.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
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Simon Willison posted a short quote from Zach Kehs on 6 September 2026, and it lands because it treats software like something that can rot forever. Kehs compares code to a building: keep adding floors and rooms and the thing will fail. Code, he says, does not have that built-in brake. It can keep accumulating indirection, dragging performance down as it grows worse and worse.
That is a neat way to describe technical debt without dressing it up. A building eventually pushes back. Software often doesn’t. It just keeps taking another layer, another abstraction, another workaround, until the pain shows up somewhere else: slower systems, harder debugging, and code that nobody enjoys touching.
Willison labels it as a quotation collected on his site, filed under technical debt. The surrounding page also points to his recent posts, but the quote itself is the point. It is blunt, and that bluntness is the warning: bad code does not hit a natural stopping point. People have to stop it.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is exactly why “we’ll tidy it up later” is one of software’s great fairy tales. Code doesn’t magically resist decay; teams just get used to the smell. The real trick is not writing perfect software, which is a nice fantasy for conference slides, but refusing to let every shortcut become a permanent floor in the building.
Read more about this at: Simon Willison’s Weblog
