Entropy

Software is a constant, losing battle against the universe itself. Just as the second law of thermodynamics dictates that isolated systems inevitably tend towards increasing disorder, so too do codebases succumb to the relentless march of "software rot" and "technical debt". As new features accumulate and environments shift, the elegant architecture of yesterday dissolves into a tangled, complex mess, a phenomenon observed in Lehman's Laws of Software Evolution as "increasing complexity". Developers pour energy into refactoring and maintenance, striving to hold back the tide of decay, but entropy, a measure of disorder, always finds a way to increase.