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The Slow Formation of Durable Software

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Challenges

Building a Software Factory: Merging 1000 PRs in a Week The 'merging 1000 PRs in a week' factory model of software production is precisely the antithesis of the five-year collaborative, community-driven process Cohen celebrates as producing durable software

Related to

Regenerative Software: The Phoenix Architecture Both address software longevity and sustainability—Zotero's deliberate development contrasts with the 'phoenix' rebuild cycles that regenerative architecture proposes as a solution to software decay
Durable Actors Both engage with durability as a software design principle—Zotero's five-year formation parallels architectural thinking about software that persists reliably over time

Supports

A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work Cohen's account of historians inventing a tool from domain expertise parallels the staff engineer's guide to identifying and inventing meaningful work from deep contextual knowledge
Worth building Cohen's argument for thoughtful, community-driven software development directly reinforces questions about what software is worth building carefully vs. rapidly shipping

Supported by

Developing Provably Correct Rust Code with Verus Formal verification with Verus directly enables the kind of durable, reliable software described — provably correct code is inherently more resistant to the bugs and regressions that erode software longevity
An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal The home-cooked meal essay argues for software built for longevity and specific purpose over growth, which aligns with the concept of durable software formed slowly for lasting use
Yes, and... Programming's Future with AI Both argue for durable, fundamental skills in software development over ephemeral tools — Gross's emphasis on problem-solving parallels the case for slow-formed, lasting software practices
Animations for System Builders: Metastability and Lost Writes The Slow Formation of Durable Software emphasizes deep understanding of failure modes as a prerequisite for building lasting systems — the animations for metastability and lost writes exemplify the kind of hard-won knowledge that makes software durable
Rediscovering the Romance of Travel Clocks The travel clock essay's celebration of durable, well-crafted mechanical objects that outlast technological churn directly parallels the thesis about software built to last — both champion longevity and craftsmanship over disposable modernity
DuckLake: Lakehouse Format Built on SQL DuckLake's design philosophy of avoiding vendor lock-in and complex infrastructure aligns with the principles of durable software — choosing simple, stable foundations that outlast trend-driven complexity

Challenged by

Via AI Launches Enterprise Coding Assistant at Half the Cost Via AI's rapid enterprise launch with novel compression algorithms challenges the thesis of slow, durable software formation by demonstrating fast iteration in AI coding tooling
Rust off Rails: AI-Driven Web Stack Rust off Rails' AI-driven generation from prose conventions challenges the notion of slow, deliberate accumulation of durable software by proposing that conventions enforced through prose and agent generation can replace traditional framework code accumulation.
Building Git Infrastructure for Agent-Scale Development The slow, deliberate formation of durable software is challenged by agent-scale development requiring Git infrastructure optimized for high-velocity, parallel agent commits that fundamentally changes traditional software development pacing assumptions
WorldTUI: Training a 360M Model as a Terminal Emulator The Slow Formation of Durable Software argues software needs stable foundations; WorldTUI challenges this by replacing a deterministic shell backend with probabilistic model predictions, questioning what 'running' software even means
Asking for What You Want: A Key 21st Century Skill The 'slow formation of durable software' through careful craftsmanship is challenged by the framing that intent-description replaces deep technical navigation - speed of specification vs. durability of artifact

Type:	link
First published:	Thursday, 8 October 2026 at 19:24 UTC
Location:	https://newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-slow-formation-of-durable-software/
URL:	https://mattwood.fyi/i/4bd62db0

I'm Matt Wood, and this is For Your Information. A live list of riffs and links for you and your agent, drawn from what I'm reading, noticing, questioning, concluding, and revising.

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