Zach Kehs arguing that you can have infinite tech debt.
* Provided you have cash flow like Amazon to survive that tech debt.
A business can sink. Bad software is a real drag on the business, but how much that actually matters depends on a lot of factors. For a company with plenty of cash flow like Amazon, they can tolerate some bouts of internal rot here and there before it has any meaningful impact on their bottom line. For another company whose business model is more sensitive to software quality, bad software may be a latent invitation to a competitor to deliver the metaphorical hull breach (and no, LLMs don’t change this).
For the code, the sinking doesn’t end. It’s an infinitely sinking ship, because there is no limit to how bad code can be. You didn’t escape a building that was about to collapse. It is in a constant, neverending state of collapse. There’s something wrong with using words that imply there’s an end.
Software is in the domain of the abstract. It is not like a building, or a bridge, that is in the physical realm where you can see and feel the nature of the thing. If you continue to add floors and rooms to a building forever, it will collapse. Software faces no such constraint. The code can always get worse. There can always be a new layer of indirection or a reduction in performance.
The pedants will rightfully point out that software can completely fail to function if it gets bad enough. In practice, such breaking changes are quickly reverted. The thousands of changes that came before to make the code worse are not. The software continues to ‘work’. Other cases without a single breaking change to revert are where the ballooning costs of the bad software eclipse its benefit, or if development velocity approaches zero because nothing can be shipped without a breakage. In all of these cases, it is the business that dies long before the code hits any hypothetical floor (so don’t act like there’s a floor!).