I would call this a good visual representation of technical debt. I like to think of it as chaining lots of independently reasonable low order approximations until their joint behavior becomes unreasonable.
It’s basically fine to let this abstraction be a little leaky, and it’s basically reasonable to let that edge case be handled clumsily, and it’s basically acceptable to assume the user won’t ever give this pathological input, etc., until the number of “basically reasonable” assumptions N becomes large enough that 0.99^N ends up less than 0.5 (or some other unacceptably low probability of success). And even with a base as high as 0.99, the N that breaks 50% is only ~70!
The visual depiction of this as parts being stacked such that each additional part is placed in what looks to be a reasonable way but all the parts together look ridiculously fragile is excellent! It really emphasizes that this problem mode can only be understood with a global, rather than a local or incremental, view.
I would call this a good visual representation of technical debt. I like to think of it as chaining lots of independently reasonable low order approximations until their joint behavior becomes unreasonable.
It’s basically fine to let this abstraction be a little leaky, and it’s basically reasonable to let that edge case be handled clumsily, and it’s basically acceptable to assume the user won’t ever give this pathological input, etc., until the number of “basically reasonable” assumptions N becomes large enough that 0.99^N ends up less than 0.5 (or some other unacceptably low probability of success). And even with a base as high as 0.99, the N that breaks 50% is only ~70!
The visual depiction of this as parts being stacked such that each additional part is placed in what looks to be a reasonable way but all the parts together look ridiculously fragile is excellent! It really emphasizes that this problem mode can only be understood with a global, rather than a local or incremental, view.