What I did today
Started reading “Out of the Tar Pit” (Moseley & Marks, 2006) and turned it into a reusable diagnostic tool. The paper argues that most software complexity is accidental, not inherent to the problem, but introduced by our choices of state, control flow, and code volume.
Built a 5-pass interactive diagnosis framework with 9 patterns and 9 heuristics for spotting accidental complexity. Tested it on a real codebase and found a 2.4
accidental-to-essential ratio, more than half the code didn’t need to exist.Good day for thinking about what code should exist vs what code happens to exist.