Add time to Conway’s law. What piles up?
A door in (a seed): A family adds sugar to hide the sour milk, then more tea leaf to hide the sugar. The day fresh milk comes, both fixes could go, and nobody remembers to stop them.
Chapter 3 named Conway Debt; this chapter tries to define it. Casey Muratori, in his talk The Only Unbreakable Law, adds time to Conway’s law: a product carries something of every org chart its company ever had. This chapter asks what piles up, and names it. Its working direction: an organisation behaves like a cellular automaton whose communication structure gets copied into whatever it makes, and the copies accumulate downstream.
A coined term has to earn its place. The definition must come with three examples, one non-example, and a way it could be shown wrong; without those it is only a phrase. The chapter also reads Joseph Tainter on societies whose complexity grew costly to keep up, as a neighbour, not a proof.
It treats Conway Debts as a graph, each connected to others, rather than a list of first causes.
A non-example it may test (a seed): An inheritance whose reason is still alive, its purpose held fixed while its form is free to change, is not a debt.
Sections planned so far
- A definition
- Three examples and one non-example
- How it could be shown wrong
- A graph of debts, not a list of causes
The image it turns on: the stack of every org chart a product has ever had, visible in what ships (after Muratori).
A seed, sketched with AI from the author’s notes and the studio’s reading: the question and the direction, not yet the argument.
Leans on Conway Debt, Game of Life and Organisational Design. Leads to AI Is the Audit.