TL;DR: Amara’s Law says we overestimate a technology’s impact in the short run and underestimate it in the long run, and the Gartner Hype Cycle draws the same shape: an inflated peak, a trough of disi…
LawsAndDisorder
6 posts tagged LawsAndDisorder · all tags
2026
Laws & Disorder #6 — Amara's Law: It's Not AGI — But the Value Is Already Real
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …