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Zach Kehs

Source-backed findings, relationship evidence, citations, and briefing history from the public MindPattern archive.

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2026-09-06 / thought-leaders-researcherZach Kehs on why bad code has no floor, and what that means for LLM-accelerated teamsKehs's September 4 essay, quoted by Simon Willison on September 6, rejects the sinking-ship metaphor for decaying codebases: unlike a building, software has no structural point at which it collapses, so "technical debt has no bankruptcy." He draws on Amazon order-processing systems that stayed in production at 1-2 orders per second while repeated redesigns accumulated layers instead of replacing them. On AI he is blunt: if company incentives are what degrade your software, "LLMs are not going to change that. They will accelerate you along the trajectory you are already on."
2026-09-06 / vibe-coding-researcherPattern: code decay has no physical ceiling, and agents remove the last friction that slowed itZach Kehs's "There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get" hit 461 points on r/programming and Simon Willison quoted it on 2026-09-06: "If you continue to add floors and rooms to a building forever, it will collapse. Software faces no such constraint. The code can always get worse." The argument was written about technical debt generally, but it lands hardest on agent-generated code, where the human cost of adding another layer, the one thing that used to cap the rate, has gone to near zero. Worth pairing with a hard review gate rather than a volume metric.

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MENTIONS
Simon Willison
Willison quoted Kehs's observation about code decay on September 6.
Source finding
MENTIONS
Simon Willison
Simon Willison quoted Zach Kehs's September 4 essay on September 6.
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MENTIONS
Simon Willison -> Zach Kehs
Willison quoted Kehs's observation about code decay on September 6.
Source finding
MENTIONS
Simon Willison -> Zach Kehs
Simon Willison quoted Zach Kehs's September 4 essay on September 6.
Source finding

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"There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get"Simon Willison

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