One post tagged with "production-systems"

Your agent v1 works. It's ugly, it's held together with prompt duct tape, and the code makes you wince every time you open it. But it handles 90% of cases, your users are happy, and it ships value every day. So naturally, you decide to rewrite it from scratch.

Six months later, the rewrite is still not in production. You've migrated frameworks twice, built a multi-agent orchestration layer for a problem that didn't require one, and your eval suite tests everything except the things that actually break. Meanwhile, v1 is still running — still ugly, still working.

This is the second system effect, and it has been destroying software projects since before most of us were born.