The cursor blinks with a rhythm that feels mocking, a rhythmic pulse of white light against the dark grey of the terminal. I’ve been staring at the ‘Refactoring’ branch on my second monitor for exactly 103 days. It was supposed to be a weekend project, a quick script to bridge the gap between our deployment pipeline and the legacy inventory system. Now, it has its own logo. It has 23 Slack channels dedicated to its various ‘modules.’ It has a mission statement. And yet, here I am, manually dragging a CSV file into a folder because the API I spent three months building is currently having a recursive existential crisis.

We are currently 183 days into our transition to The Nexus. It was designed to replace Jira, because we decided Jira was too bloated. We were tired of the lag, the cluttered UI, the feeling of being trapped in a corporate spreadsheet from 1993. So, we did what any group of people with too much technical confidence and not enough supervision would do: we built our own. We told the board it would save us $13,003 a month in licensing fees. We didn’t mention it would cost us 3 million dollars in lost engineering hours.

We have successfully automated our own obsolescence, not by making things faster, but by making the ‘meta-work’ so complex that the actual work has become a secondary concern. It is a strange loop of our own making, a Moebius strip of technical debt where the solution and the problem have merged into a single, indivisible mass.

The Wisdom of Disappearing Tools

Yuki E., the groundskeeper at the hillside cemetery where I walk during my lunch breaks, understands this better than any CTO I’ve ever met. Yuki E. doesn’t have a digital fleet management system for the graves. She doesn’t have a bespoke app to track the growth rate of the grass or the moss levels on the 703 headstones she maintains. She has a rake. It is a wooden rake with three missing tines, and she has used it for 13 years.

“

If I spend my morning thinking about the rake, the leaves are still on the ground at noon. The rake is only good if it disappears.

– Yuki E., Grounds Keeper

We have forgotten how to make our tools disappear. We celebrate the tool. We hold ‘lunch and learns’ about the tool. We write 183-page documentation wikis for the tool. We have become obsessed with the architecture of the hammer, and we have completely lost interest in the house we were supposed to be building. This is the great technical bias: the unwavering, almost religious belief that any human friction, any messy process, any lack of clarity can be solved with another layer of abstraction.

Scaling the Void

It’s a form of productive procrastination that is particularly insidious because it looks like high-value labor. When you are writing a custom DSL for your internal CI/CD pipeline, you feel like a genius. You are solving hard problems. You are optimizing. You are ‘scaling.’ But you are scaling a void. You are building a faster engine for a car that has no wheels. We choose the complexity of the tool because the complexity of the task is too daunting.

Why are we so afraid of the simple solution? Part of it is the ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome, surely. But I think there’s something deeper, something related to how we derive our identity as ‘creators.’ If I use a standard tool, I am just a user. If I build the tool, I am an architect. We would rather be the architect of a failing system than the user of a successful one.

The Cost of Synchronization

During the meeting, I looked out the window and saw Yuki E. raking the same patch of grass she raked 13 days ago. There was no synchronization error. The leaves were moving from Point A to Point B. The tool had disappeared, and only the work remained.

We are technicians who have fallen in love with our toolboxes, forgetting that the world doesn’t need more toolboxes; it needs more things built.

The Next Iteration (Of Falling)

We are currently planning ‘The Nexus 2.0.’ It’s going to feature a rewritten core in Rust to ensure memory safety. We estimate it will take another 233 days to reach feature parity with the current version, which is already 183 days behind schedule. The lead architect is excited. He says the new concurrency model will allow us to handle 10,003 simultaneous users. We only have 53 employees.

I picked up the pen I had spent 43 minutes selecting-a heavy brass fountain pen with a fine nib-and I crossed out the note. I didn’t fix the bug. I just realized that I don’t need The Nexus to tell me what I already know. The strange loop only ends when you stop walking in circles.