Complexity Is Future Downtime, Held in Inventory

Complexity's invoice arrives at 2 a.m. Track exceptions like debt, retire them on purpose.

Every one-off tunnel during a migration, every manual route pinned down by a support call, every "temporary" port-forward from 2019 — that's complexity inventory. Compounding, undated, and due at the worst hours.

Audit exceptions like debt

• List every manualoverride and the ticket that created it — the without-a-ticket ones are the spikes
• Each carries an owner, an expiry condition, or it enters the retirement plan
• Budget a percentage of every change window to debt paydown

The pride trap

Architecture gets defended as design when really it's a calendar: someone scheduled the complicated future. Choose honestly — you will pay in staffing, consultations, or outages so unexplained maps pile up.

The best question in any design review: "who maintains the clever part the week the person who loved it transfers?"