I've used the word "coherence" to describe this state; when an individual or a team has adequately groked the system and its historical context to achieve a lev

I've used the word "coherence" to describe this state; when an individual or a team has adequately groked the system and its historical context to achieve a level of productivity in maintenance and extension, only then is the system coherent. Additionally and IMO critically to this discussion: Its easy for products or features to "die" not when the engineers associated with it lose coherence on how it is implemented from a technical perspective, but also when the product people associated with it lose coherence on why it exists or who it exists for. The product can die even if one party (e.g. engineers) still maintains coherence while the other party (e.g. product/business) does not. At this point you've hit a state where the system cannot be maintained or worked on because everyone is too afraid of breaking an existing workflow. LLMs are, like, barely 3% of the way toward solving the hardest problems I and my coworkers deal with day-to-day. But the bigger problem is that I don't yet know which 3% it is. Actually, the biggest problem is maybe that its a different, dynamic 3% of every new problem.