Disclaimer: This series reflects my personal opinions and experiences. It does not represent the views of my employers, past or present, nor does it contain proprietary information.
Throughout this series, we’ve focused on channeling entropy, but let’s be clear: we can’t actually beat it. Here is the sobering truth:
The law is simple: entropy always increases, and entropy always wins. Time is merely its accomplice.
To illustrate, let’s slip into a parallel universe where I’m still a sci-fi manga fanatic, using our Focus Restoration Device™ to “enjoy” reading.
The saga of our Focus Restoration Device™ is a cautionary tale told in four parts. 1) We began in 2019 with blissful ignorance, logging browser tabs and scroll speeds, convinced we had mastered the art of attention. We were, in hindsight, hilariously naive. 2) Then 2022 unleashed the AI kraken, and our users began outsourcing their manga consumption to ChatGPT and Midjourney. Our device was left to ponder the deep philosophical question of whether generating AI art for hours is a state of focus or a cry for help. 3) By 2025, the browser was a relic. Users simply spoke to AI agents, which did their bidding across the web, leaving our device to track the digital whispers of API calls and support a mysterious “Agent Activity Monitor” that had become critical infrastructure for reasons no one could explain. 4) Now, in 2027, neural interfaces have rendered our entire model obsolete. Our system, bless its heart, is still searching for browser tabs while its users are achieving quantum attention states—a development that has the FDA inquiring about the imaginary numbers popping up in our therapeutic calculations1.
Back in our own timeline, let’s quantify the cost of this evolution.
| Evolution Stage | What We Planned | What Actually Happened | Entropy Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stage 1: Simple Browser | Monitor pages, measure focus | Clean and working | Baseline |
| Stage 2: AI Enhancement | Add AI detection patterns | 50+ edge cases appeared | 10x complexity |
| Stage 3: Agent Chaos | Track agent behavior | Agents broke our assumptions | 100x complexity |
| Stage 4: Neural Interface | Minor compatibility update | Complete paradigm failure | ∞ complexity |
Each stage, we deluded ourselves with the mantra of “managing technical debt,” when in reality, we were just accumulating entropy’s scar tissue. Every adaptation to new user behavior and technology leaps became a permanent, fossilized layer in our codebase, like the still-running AI detection module from 2022 or the agent monitor that turned out to be mission-critical for a specific subgenre of internet users. This inevitable compounding of chaos makes a mockery of our three-zone architecture; the supposedly pure core now juggles seventeen “temporary” services to define “reading,” the clinical interface resembles a case of evolutionary biology gone wrong, and the integration layer has apparently gained sentience and started sending us pull requests. The antifragility we cherished in the last blog is now a fantasy. Our system was performing as “intended,” transforming itself into an entropy-collection device that just so happens to deliver therapeutic zaps.
This brings us back to my earlier point about ever-increasing entropy, which has a formal, universe-ending conclusion: for any closed system, “heat death is inevitable”2.
Accepting this humbling truth is liberating. We can stop pretending our code is a monument built to last forever and start building purposeful scaffolding: temporary, replaceable, and designed for deletion. The path forward isn’t about resisting change, which is like resisting gravity, but about engineering systems that evolve predictably and fail gracefully. Our architecture, then, must not stop evolution but channel it. Our testing must not ensure perfection but map failure modes. And when the time comes for a refactor, it should be a controlled demolition, not an archaeological dig. Our Focus Restoration Device™, held together by digital duct tape and regulatory prayers, is honest about what it is: a system in constant, managed decay that still helps people in an incomprehensible world. That’s not defeat; that’s engineering.
Previous: Part 4 - Becoming Antifragile: When Medical Software Gets Stronger From Chaos
Next: Part 6 - The Entropy Warrior’s Creed: A Philosophy for SaMD
References
Footnotes
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Lehman, M. M. (1996). “Laws of Software Evolution Revisited.” European Workshop on Software Process Technology. The laws governing how software systems inevitably evolve toward greater complexity and the inevitability of software decay over time. ↩
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Adams, F. C., & Laughlin, G. (1997). “A dying universe: the long-term fate and evolution of astrophysical objects.” Reviews of Modern Physics. This paper provides a detailed scientific projection of the ultimate fate of the universe, including the concept of “heat death” as a result of the second law of thermodynamics. ↩