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Spaghetti Towers — LessWrong

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Here’s a pattern I’d like to be able to talk about. It might be known under a certain name somewhere, but if it is, I don’t know it. I call it a Spaghetti Tower. It shows up in large complex systems that are built haphazardly. Someone or something builds the first Part A. Later, someone wants to put a second Part B on top of Part A, either out of convenience (a common function, just somewhere to put it) or as a refinement to Part A. Now, suppose you want to tweak Part A. If you do that, you might break Part B, since it interacts with bits of Part A. So you might instead build Part C on top of the previous ones. And by the time your system looks like this, it’s much harder to tell what changes you can make to an earlier part without crashing some component, so you’re basically relegated to throwing another part on top of the pile. I call these spaghetti towers for two reasons: One, because they tend to quickly take on circuitous knotty tangled structures, like what programmers call “spa

x Spaghetti Towers — LessWrong Best of LessWrong 2018 Coordination / Cooperation Definitions Programming World Modeling Curated 247 Spaghetti Towers by eukaryote 22nd Dec 2018 Linkpost for eukaryotewritesblog.com 3 min read 42 247 Here’s a pattern I’d like to be able to talk about. It might be known under a certain name somewhere, but if it is, I don’t know it. I call it a Spaghetti Tower. It shows up in large complex systems that are built haphazardly. Someone or something builds the first Part A. Later, someone wants to put a second Part B on top of Part A, either out of convenience (a commo

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