August 10, 2026 Laws & Disorder #5 — Goodhart's Law: The Goal You Specify Is the Only One You Get

TL;DR: Goodhart’s Law says that when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. People optimize the number and quietly drop every goal you had in mind but never expressed. I once watch…

August 3, 2026 Laws & Disorder #4 — Gall's Law: Great Systems Are Built From Small Bricks, Not Big Plans

TL;DR: Gall’s Law says a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked, and that a complex system designed from scratch never works. There are two read…

July 27, 2026 Laws & Disorder #3 — Tesler's Law: You Can't Delete Complexity, Only Choose Who Owns It

TL;DR: Tesler’s Law, the conservation of complexity, says a system has an inherent amount of complexity that can be reallocated between owners but not simply deleted, and the boundary condition is tha…

July 20, 2026 Laws & Disorder #2 — Hyrum's Law: In the Age of Agents, Who Pays for a Broken API?

TL;DR: Hyrum’s Law says that with enough users, every observable behavior of your API becomes something someone depends on, whether you documented it or not. The implementation quietly becomes the int…

July 13, 2026 Laws & Disorder #1 — Conway's Law: Your Org Chart Is Your Real Architecture (and AI Is Redrawing Both)

🎬 Also available as a blog walkthrough video, a short narrated screencast of this post. TL;DR: Conway’s Law says a system’s structure ends up mirroring the communication structure of the organization …