I was going to post the same thing. I found it interesting that the parent comment thought that quote was one of the highlights of the article. To me the quote

I was going to post the same thing. I found it interesting that the parent comment thought that quote was one of the highlights of the article. To me the quote is far too vague to be converted into anything executable. My impression is that he means something like identifying a part of the codebase that anytime a story requires working in it, it sucks. I remember we had some old UI object written in some arcane javascript and everyone felt like dying when they had to work in it. But in my experience, the pointing process naturally included that as a consideration. I believe my brain already processes that algebra of complexity in it's native operations when I estimate a point value. I'm not sure that attempting to materialize this "algebra" into some system of equations would be very helpful.