Pattern: code decay has no physical ceiling, and agents remove the last friction that slowed it

Simon Willison·low signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Zach 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.