When Engineering Axioms Collapse

How Teams Forget the Laws That Keep Systems Alive

Companion to “The Empire of Fragility”, this essay explores the structural side of systemic decay, where culture and engineering principles intertwine and collapse together.

Every once in a while, a post-incident review reveals something deeper than a technical fault. You scroll down the action items, and the last line reads: something painfully generic, like “we should improve code review practices,” “make PRs smaller,” or “add more automated tests”, one of those familiar lines that appear at the bottom of every incident report.

At that moment, you know the investigation has reached the bedrock. The organisation has not drifted from its principles. It has collapsed into forgetting them.

From Incident to Autopsy

Incidents usually start with proximate causes: a regression, a missing cache, an API flood. They end with the discovery that the code did not fail alone, the system of thought around it failed too. The regression was only a messenger. The real issue hides in the cultural substrate: a broken relationship with scale, complexity, and craftsmanship.

A quick survey of other areas will reveal similar fractures: missing fundamentals at process level, weak or absent engineering metrics, shallow decision-making, and confused prioritisation. Systemic failures abound: no rollout or rollback policy, no clear acceptance criteria, constant friction over rigorous code scanning or test enforcement. Fundamentals disappear quietly, and most people stop noticing. They adapt and live within the void as if nothing were missing.

When “smaller PRs” becomes a corrective action, it signals that the team has abandoned composability as a discipline. The collapse happens quietly. Code grows monolithic, reviews turn superficial, tests become optional, and release discipline dissolves under the pressure of speed. The team forgets the laws that once protected it from itself.

What follows is predictable: cascading failures, unobservable systems, a sense of surprise when trivial mistakes reach production. Recovery does not come from another tool or framework. It begins with the painful recognition that axioms must be rediscovered, not reinvented.

The Axioms of Craft

Engineering, like mathematics, rests on a set of non-negotiable truths.You may choose to ignore them, but you cannot avoid their consequences.They are the quiet laws that hold every system together:

1. Boundaries preserve comprehension.Every system, service, or module needs clear limits. Without boundaries, no reasoning holds.
2. Causality precedes optimisation.You cannot accelerate what you do not understand. Measuring before modelling is a form of blindness.
3. Change must remain controlled.Versioning, testing, and review are not rituals. They are forms of structural memory.
4. Ownership cannot diffuse.If everyone touches everything, nothing belongs to anyone. Responsibility dissolves and quality decays.

When a team reaches for “smaller PRs,” it unknowingly reaches back to Axiom 3. It is the engineering equivalent of rediscovering gravity after a crash. A self-evident principle becomes revolutionary again because the culture has unlearned it.

Collapse versus Drift

Drift implies direction without intent. Collapse implies a loss of foundation. A drifting team still holds fragments of awareness. A collapsing one operates on nostalgia. It remembers that discipline once mattered, not why it mattered.

This distinction matters because recovery requires different energy. To correct drift, you re-align. To recover from collapse, you rebuild belief. No amount of process will repair a structure that no longer believes in the value of structure.

When reviews lose rigour and post-mortems conclude with obvious truths, it means the system of reasoning itself has been compromised. It becomes toxic when stating the obvious turns into a walk through the valley of sorrow. People stop asking why until failure forces them to rediscover first principles, just as mathematicians once had to re-axiomatise set theory to avoid paradox. But when they rediscover them, it might already be too late.

The Fragility of Memory

Organisations forget faster than they learn. Each new generation of engineers inherits the tools but not the scars. Automation hides the rituals that once cultivated respect for risk. The very success of abstraction becomes the seed of decay.

Caching, deployment pipelines, monitoring, all born as safety nets, turn invisible. When they fail, people discover their importance only through absence. This is how civilisations decline in miniature: not through invasion, but through forgetting the laws that made them work.

The result is an organisation that confuses motion with progress, equating throughput with value and release frequency with maturity. At that point, even the most sophisticated system becomes a house of cards resting on eroded axioms.

The Normalisation of Decay

Collapse rarely announces itself. It arrives quietly, disguised as continuity. Like the parable of the boiled frog, the temperature rises imperceptibly, and comfort becomes complicity. Each small compromise, skipping a test, bypassing a review, accepting a vague requirement, feels inconsequential, yet collectively they redefine what the organisation calls normal.

Toxicity does not emerge through confrontation but through accommodation. People adjust to lower standards, adapt to noise, and silence their discomfort in the name of pragmatism. The once-visible horizon of excellence dissolves into fog. What remains is a culture that rewards presence over precision, speed over structure, and optimism over truth.

By the time awareness returns, the system has boiled itself into fragility. Recovery then demands not only technical reform but moral courage, the courage to declare that what has become tolerable should never have been accepted at all.

The Weight of the Obvious

There comes a point when leadership becomes an act of exhaustion. How do you explain the obvious without breaking inside? How do you describe a tree (this is the trunk, these are the leaves) to people who debate whether trees exist. A stance strikingly parallel to the denial found in parts of modern culture, where postmodernist progressivism has blurred the line between belief and reality ?

This is the daily paradox of leading through collapse. You speak of testing, ownership, causality, and structure, and you meet disbelief, irony, or fatigue.

What drains leaders is not resistance to change, but the absurdity of having to defend what once was self-evident.

Now, scale that frustration to an entire company, to every missing foundation, every blurred accountability, every forgotten axiom. The emotional cost compounds until even the most committed begin to withdraw, not from duty, but from despair. At that point, leadership itself becomes another casualty of decay. When the emotional fabric of leadership tears, the system loses not its managers, but its meaning.

Historical Parallels

This pattern is not unique to software or startups. History offers painful reminders of what happens when fundamentals erode silently. NASA’s Challenger and Columbia disasters were not accidents of physics but failures of attention. Engineers had warned for years, yet leadership normalised deviance, redefining danger as acceptable risk until tragedy forced reality back into view.

Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal revealed another form of collapse: moral engineering. In the pursuit of performance metrics and market perception, the company violated its own axioms of honesty and rigour. Once exposed, recovery required a complete reconstitution of its ethical and technical foundations.

Both stories prove that decay is never purely technical. It begins when culture accepts small compromises as harmless, when discomfort is muted, and when truth becomes negotiable.

Restoring the Foundations

Recovery from collapse demands humility.One must accept that the system does not need new rituals: it needs renewed conviction. The laws of sound engineering have not changed since the Apollo era. What changed is our tolerance for violating them.

This cannot remain an optional programme or a gentle transformation. This moment requires a bulky, bold intervention: non-negotiable minimums, mandated across teams and enforced by leadership. Make the basics binary. Either every team adopts clear rollout and rollback policies, explicit acceptance criteria, enforced test coverage and code scanning, and strict merge gates, or the organisation accepts increasing fragility and recurring collapse.

Restoration begins when leadership treats quality not as a trade-off, but as the medium through which speed and reliability coexist. Enforcement must follow rhetoric: automated gates that block unsafe changes, visible metrics that refuse managerial obscurity, and accountable owners empowered to stop unsafe releases. It continues when teams shrink pull requests, write tests, document decisions, and review code with the seriousness once reserved for flight systems.

The recovery of fundamentals must start from what is visible. The broken window theory applies here, much like a principle found in David Sloan Wilson's Darwin’s Cathedral: individuals do not need to fully understand every belief or rule for them to be effective. What matters is visible compliance and reinforcement. When people see small breaches tolerated, a failing test ignored, a review skipped, a warning left unresolved, they just assume neglect is acceptable. But when visible order returns, belief follows.

Fixing the visible does not trivialise the mission: it anchors it. Small acts of rigour create moral alignment and re-establish trust in the system. Yet this does not change two essential truths:

1. Fundamentals must never again be taken for granted.
2. You either live by them, or you leave.

If someone cannot comply with the basic laws that protect the organisation from collapse, they cannot help it either.

The process resembles rebuilding a philosophy: every law restated, every habit justified from first principles. This is not optional adoption. It is a foundation. Either we all hold to it, or we watch the structure fail.

The Quiet Revolution

True transformation rarely starts with grand declarations. It begins in the silence following a failure, when someone dares to say aloud that the last action in the PIR should never have been needed. From there, a slow revolution takes place: one commit, one review, one conversation at a time.

The goal is not perfection, but remembrance. Keeping alive the axioms that make progress possible. Because once an organisation forgets them, the next collapse is only a matter of time.

What survives is what remembers.

This reflection stands alongside The Empire of Fragility: one examines the cultural corrosion that precedes collapse, the other the structural amnesia that follows. Together, they form a single diagnosis of how systems, and the people who build them, forget what once made them strong.