Control and complexity: tension in systems design

The adoption of LLMs in software development has led countless organizations to rapidly change their practices and structures. Old methods are questioned, replaced, and repurposed as the economics around creating new code get shaken up. Because humans and LLMs aren’t interchangeable, the dynamics in play are also very different. Systems are systems, and so regardless of what is changing, there are known patterns on which we can draw to provide some guidance and warnings.Without taking a step back and looking at the mindset behind the design of the system in which you operate, you’re likely to get somewhat incoherent (as in “clashing” and “conflicting,” not as in “nonsensical”) measures and policies. And so in this post I want to discuss how we organize systems by contrasting two families of approaches.The first is about analytical decomposition that aims to maintain control over a system, and the other is based on a perspective of complex systems that resist analysis, which tend to…