Why does a shape nobody would choose today keep running?
A door in (a seed): “Always finish your plate,” said by a mother in a lean year, still rules her grown son at a wedding buffet, thirty years and two sizes later.
This chapter names the thing before it defines it. Conway Debt is the inherited shape of past decisions, org charts and ontologies, still running after the reasons for them have gone. The villain is inheritance, not an ideology. The save button that still shows a floppy disk is the gentle version; a form, a rule or a report that outlives its purpose is the costly one.
The chapter has to tell Conway Debt apart from its neighbours: technical debt, organisational debt and social debt, path dependence, habit and lock-in. Each is close. Its working guess is that the difference lies in where the shape comes from, the way people were organised when the decision was made, and in how it keeps copying itself into whatever is built next. Chapter 7 tests that guess.
A checked essay already names the idea: Your AI Agent Inherited the Bureaucracy. This chapter grows from there.
A line it may earn (a seed): The reason died; the rule kept its job.
Sections planned so far
- Still saving to floppy
- Not technical debt, not path dependence, not lock-in
- The old form kept after its reason has gone
- One ordinary day, audited
The image it turns on: the floppy-disk save icon.
This chapter might instead be called Still Saving to Floppy.
A sprout: a checked essay carries its core; the rest of this page is sketched with AI from the author’s notes and the studio’s reading.
Leans on Sāmatvārtha 15-min Explainer. Leads to Game of Life, and is defined in Defining Conway Debt. Read now: Your AI Agent Inherited the Bureaucracy, a checked essay.