Lindy Effect

“The longer something has survived, the longer it will keep surviving.”

The Lindy Effect comes from a 1964 article by Albert Goldman titled “Lindy’s Law,” which described an observation he made about show business, but has been broadened to life in general first by Benoit Mandlebrot, and then by Nassim Taleb.

For example, a book that has been in print for 100 years is, by Lindy Effect logic, more likely to remain relevant and durable than a book published last year.

Have you ever put something on a shelf or in a cabinet temporarily, fully meaning to figure out where it should live permanently later on, but that just becomes its permanent location? That’s the Lindy Effect.

The Lindy Effect happens to software engineers all the time. We make a little script or tool, and it’s fragile and crappy and was never intended to live beyond today, but then it somehow gets legs. You use it again tomorrow and your colleague sees it and asks you to share it. They use it. It makes it into the repository, and other members of the team start using it.

Now it’s been around for a while, and other tooling and infrastructure use it and are built around it.

Eventually, it just is part of the workflow. With all of its fragility and foibles.

We also call that “tech debt.”

The reason we call it debt is because eventually, we have to pay the piper. We have to clean it up. And that process is usually daunting, time-consuming, and costly.

AI loves to create tech debt. It’s one of its superpowers.

AI doesn’t know about the future. It doesn’t know what you’re planning on doing with it and what it’s making. Therefore, it’s always trying to build the easiest solution it can. Unless you give it requirements and specs that define the future it must consider, you’ll get a crappy little one-off solution that creates debt right away.

To guard against the Lindy Effect, ensuring poor software lives longer than it should, you gotta be a good boss of AI.

And being a good boss of AI is really just being a good engineer.

P.S. Lindy’s, by the way, was a New York deli in which many actors and comedians hung out in the 60s.