The Rental Mindset

It was 2:13 a.m. Alerts blew up my phone. I opened the runbook. The first link was dead. The person who knew this part of the system had already left. A note said, “We will document this next sprint.” That sprint never came.

We did not own this system. We were just passing through.

A few years ago, the code felt cared for. Names made sense. Tests told you what actually broke. Comments explained tradeoffs. It was not perfect, but you could feel intent.

Then layoffs came in waves. Good people left. Those who stayed learned a simple rule to get through the week: ship the minimum, clean up later, move to the next ticket. Work turned into a stream of tasks. I worked week to week, not year to year.

Craft slipped. Throughput became the only headline.

New tools helped us go faster. Code Assistant got good. AI could draft a function from a hint. That saved time. But these tools learn from our code. If our code carries shortcuts, the tools suggest more shortcuts. Over time, we click Accept more than we ask Why. The code gets heavier. Our understanding gets lighter.

The decline did not arrive with fireworks. It showed up as small cuts:

• A feature flag that stayed on long after the launch
• Ownership unclear after people moved teams
• A quick fix that hid the symptom, not the cause
• A diagram that no longer matched the real system

Back at 2:13 a.m., we jumped on a video call. Docs were outdated. Context lived in people who were not there. We tried a few things, found a stopgap, and got the site mostly back. By sunrise we had a list of findings we had all seen before: low ownership, half-done cleanup, thin reviews, too much fragile glue.

Here is the part under the graphs. We are running low on people who can repair the stairs. The folks who hold the deep mental model are retiring or in different rooms. New engineers are smart and fast, but they are onboarding into a culture that treats craft as optional. They learn from code that says speed is the number that matters. The tools fill the gaps with confident text. It works until it does not. By the time someone asks why, the original why is gone.

There is a tipping point in any complex system. It is not when code looks messy. It is when our shared understanding drops below the system’s complexity. After that, we stop fixing root causes. We manage symptoms. We rent.

I do not judge anyone for going with the flow. Markets move. Teams shrink. People have bills and families. In many seasons, speed is the only choice that fits real life.

The question I keep for myself is simple: when I pick speed today, am I making this easier or harder to own six months from now? Sometimes speed is right. Sometimes a small act of craft is the better trade.

This is a fictional story and has no relation to any of my current and previous jobs.