The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/03/26/winchester-mystery-house.html

by dbreunig • 4 months ago

190 66 4 months ago

Does anyone know what “agent tea” is in the second graph? There is a paper about a protocol but it seems a bit obscure to be featured in this context and the other two points on the graph are models.

jffry• 4 months ago

I think the graph is getting cut off for you - for me it reads "Agent Teams"

gerikson• 4 months ago

The "cathedral" in ESR's essay wasn't proprietary closed source, it was the GNU project.

fulafel2• 4 months ago

Most of free software (incl the BSD stuff) was like that. The bazaar was an attempt to characterise the new linux style way of doing it.

TeMPOraL• 4 months ago

Makes me realize that "Worse is Better" was, in today's terms, apologism for vibe-coding.

TZubiri• 4 months ago

It wasnt one thing, gnu is a case of cathedrals. Corps are usually more cathedrally than bazaary because of their hierarchical top down structure, but ymmv, an elon musk or steve jobs company will be more cathedral than a conglomerate like unilever or a google or microsoft

sollewitt• 4 months ago

Google is famously a slime mold.

tptacek3• 4 months ago

The essay also didn't kick anything off; it was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing.

positron266• 4 months ago

GNU didn't kick anything off. It was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing.

What was in full swing was Open Source, powered by scratch-your-own-itch. What was taking time was for the business world to learn the lessons by both carrot (Linux) and stick (Unix Wars, vendor lock-in, dozens of crappy competing standards). When Steve Balmer winds up using your language, you moved the ball.

Many ideas from The Cathedral & The Bazaar made it into The Lean Startup. The Cathedral development model was more related to waterfall. YC was already chugging along, but you can bet your ass PG was already steeped in the tea.

layer84• 4 months ago

Not really. From the essay: “I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.”

So the Unix-philosophy small tools that constitute an important part of the GNU project are excluded. Rather, it’s about any programs of significant complexity, like Emacs (and likely GCC) and many commercial products. While the cathedral model doesn’t imply closed source, it implies building “in […] isolation”, rather than in the open. It may or may not remain proprietary and/or closed source.

Linux demonstrated to ESR that complex projects can also be built in the open with many collaborators, and don’t necessarily require the cathedral; which inspired the essay.

bandofthehawk• 4 months ago

Originally "the GNU project" was supposed to be an operating system. That might be what the parent post was referencing.

ghaff2• 4 months ago

The bottom line is that a lot of software types assume the cathedral vs. bazaar refers to closed source vs. open source and they’re simply wrong.

positron266• 4 months ago

Unix-philosophy small tools that constitute an important part of the GNU project

The statement you chose makes a carve-out for Unix, not GNU. It doesn't support "not really."

7rirdnj• 4 months ago

Which is why maintainers feel like they’re drowning.

How about actually funding opensource project mantainers? We have non profit orgs, that eat billions of public funds. We spend biilions for influencing hardly measurable metrics, with very nebulous benefits in far distant future.

Direct sponsoring of critical projects would have far better and concrete benefits.

jrm4• 4 months ago

This plus accountability is the way; and what I think I mean here is "accountability for those who choose to USE (maybe not create) the software in a way that may be harmful."

If you'd like to push that accountability to the developers, that can work, but they should be paid or otherwise compensated accordingly for the risk they take on.

dpark• 4 months ago

We should fund them, sure, but that’s not enough.

The problem is the cost is so wildly asymmetric. When everyone with a computer and a subscription can vibe code low quality features, when everyone can submit dubious security bug reports, no amount of funding will even that out. Producing submissions is essentially free while triaging and reviewing remains very expensive.

3 years ago the cost was asymmetric in the other direction. The cost of writing code was high. The cost of finding security bugs was extremely high. The cost of triaging and reviewing was basically the same as it is today.

Large corporations that are well funded are facing the exact same issues internally right now. With agent output so cheap, how do you deal with the deluge? It’s not practical or desirable to have your best engineers doing nothing but reviewing generated code, some of which is likely very low value.

drob5185• 4 months ago

LLMs can drown a fleet of paid maintainers. Machines can generate code (even good code, not just slop) far faster than humans can evaluate it.

zdragnar• 4 months ago

Why spend more money just to trawl through BS contributions? Cutting off the nonsense would be both cheaper and have the same result.

More funding for more development of open source is a good thing, but more money to ease the burden imposed by an ever rising tide of slop is not a solution.

DonHopkins4• 4 months ago

Gary Tan’s personal AI committee gstack is a Winchester Mystery House constructed mostly from Markdown.

Winchester Mystery Potemkin Village.

drob5185• 4 months ago

Yea, I was curious about that, too. It’s one thing to vibe code a one-off personal project. It’s another to create something that can run the distance.

MBCook2• 4 months ago

I’d just like to thank the author for giving the correct t reason for the Winchester Mystery House instead of just blindly repeating the “she went crazy” line story as truth.

citizenpaul• 4 months ago

she went crazy”

That's literally what they tell you on the paid tour....

MBCook2• 4 months ago

I know. And it’s what I learned from Jack Palace on the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not TV show, where I first heard about it. Because it makes a really good story.

“She was a woman so sexism meant couldn’t be an architect. The only way she could live out her dream was just to build her own house over and over.“ isn’t nearly as fun.

The fact she was afraid of ghosts from people killed by her husband‘s invention just slots in so well as “evidence“. Add a crazy looking house and there you go, perfect tourist trap.

The_Goonies19852• 4 months ago

"Sarah didn’t build her mansion to house ghosts, she built her mansion because she liked architecture."

That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades. Specifically: Sarah Winchester built the house because she was told that the ghosts of all those killed by Winchester guns would haunt her unless her house was sufficiently labyrinthine, and endlessly expanding; to confuse them.

Visit the house (the tour is rad) and see for yourself the architecture. There is no reasonable explanation for internal doors leading to sheer-drops, throughout the house, and other bizarre 'traps', apart from Sarah legitimately believing she had to confuse the ghosts.

This is more akin to a programmer consciously obfuscating and expanding a codebase to make it impossible for their angry-users to ever finish auditing it, or to determine its author.

kbutler• 4 months ago

Refactoring w/o removing all dead code.

jcranmer• 4 months ago

That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades.

The house is run by an organization that has a very vested interest in playing up the supernatural element of the house. Some tour guides have gone on record discussing their frustrations with having to repeat known falsehoods to guests.

Visit the house (the tour is rad) and see for yourself the architecture. There is no reasonable explanation for internal doors leading to sheer-drops, throughout the house, and other bizarre 'traps', apart from Sarah legitimately believing she had to confuse the ghosts.

Parts of the house were damaged by the 1906 earthquake and were not rebuilt. A lot of the weird path-to-nowhere stuff is "the destination collapsed during the earthquake", nothing particularly mysterious there.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 4 months ago

Wikipedia agrees with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House#Labyr...

The_Goonies19852• 4 months ago

The house is run by an organization that has a very vested interest in playing up the supernatural element of the house.

Sure, but we're dealing in oral-folklore that's over a century old here. I don't see any reason to value the earthquake-theory over the ghost-trap theory.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Except, of course, that modern academia is opposed to accepting, or investigating, anything paranormal (see Wikipedia etc).

I first visited the Winchester house in 1985, as a child, and it sure felt ghost infested to me back then. You can't get more scientific than that. My sister (also a child at the time) peer-reviewed my findings.

ericbarrett• 4 months ago

the tour is rad

As others have noted, the guides are full of tall tales. I grew up in San Jose and remember when the property next to the Winchester Mystery House was a drive-in theater, and before the House was fire-damaged. The B.S. was well-known even then. My father, who moved to San Jose in the 1950s, even explained it to me as a child after some friends who were into ghost stories told me about it.

I don't know if it's still there, but my favorite part of the site was the detached museum showing some of the earliest pieces developed by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. Easy to miss as it is not part of the house or the guided tour.

gorfian_robot2• 4 months ago

as an aside the lore about the "Winchester Mystery House" is all made up hogwash. here is one place where it is debunked:

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2024/08/the-truth-about-sallie...

burnt-resistor• 4 months ago

Seems about right and American: pervert a dead person's reputation and personality into a cartoonish mythological character to fabricate lore for a profitable tourist attraction. Add doors to nowhere and guided tours repeating misinformation, exit through the gift shop.

PS: While I grew up in San Jose, my parents unfortunately took me on that tour once. It looked extremely staged and all about $$$ then and I was a dumb kid. It occupied a plot of land in a very busy area across what is now Santana Row and beside the original hemispherical buildings of the first Century 21 theaters that originally had massive parking lots that extended all the way to Winchester Blvd back when people went to the movies. The parking lot was only eclipsed by the nearby Winchester Drive-In in Campbell. Where Santana Row is at the corner of Stevens Creek and Winchester was the car dealership Courtesy Chevrolet.

gorfian_robot2• 4 months ago

it is still a cool house and I enjoy the tour. but I lag back and ignore the guide.

jonah• 4 months ago

Too bad Winchester didn't become an architect.

Julia Morgan, Winchester's contemporary, was the first woman to obtain an architecture license in California in 1904 and had a very prolific career throughout the state including her most famous - Hearst Castle - commissioned in 1919.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 4 months ago

One of my guilty pleasures as a software engineer is that working on my Winchester House is way more fun than working on someone else's Cathedral, or Bazaar.

PaulDavisThe1st• 4 months ago

I'm pretty sure that I could consistently spew 1000 lines a day/per commit if it was mostly cut-n-pasting of existing code, that I had complete access to, with some minor variations.

hedora• 4 months ago

Does anyone have numbers for churn vs. cumulative code?

Most of my commits (hand written and AI) have delete counts that are 75-110% the added line count.

The point that many developers will probably forget to tell the LLM to run cleanup/refactoring paths is probably true though. (I’ve definitely found ghost-chasing bugfixes in all sorts of corners of LLM generated code).

rsanheim• 4 months ago

Yeah /simplify is your friend. That and constrained prompts - “refactor x for simplicity - resulting diff must remove n lines of code. Dont change tests. “

drob5185• 4 months ago

So, I’ve explored AI coding, but my conclusion up to this point has been that it’s interesting, but the code is sometimes a mess, and sometimes it will completely crater the project to the point where you just have to throw it all away and start over. After reading this article, I keep wondering if we’re really being productive or just creating lots of crappy code at machine speeds now. It’s one thing to say that we are using a “security agent,” for example, to ensure the security of the code, but quite another to actually know (or at least strongly believe) that our code is really secure. With all the froth of generating thousands of lines of code, how are we sure? In some sense, my question is whether we’re building a Winchester Mystery House or a house of cards.

skybrian3• 4 months ago

Software developers working on their own have built monstrosities before (not as quickly) but it seems likely that this is a skill issue and we will learn how to use these tools better. You can tell coding agents to work on cleaning up code, improving the architecture, and so on.

Maybe adopting some hard constraints on code complexity that agents have to work within would help?

drob5185• 4 months ago

Yep, surely humans write bad code, too. But not nearly as fast. This feels a lot like hiring oodles of hyper-productive junior developers. Are we going to get true productivity out of that or a scrambled mess? I don’t know the answer to that. Or maybe the models get so much better that it’s like hiring oodles of senior developers and architects and the payoff is real.

bee_rider• 4 months ago

Maybe the bots should be made to write MISRA-C. It isn’t like they get annoyed, right?

fragmede• 4 months ago

Before, when code was laboriously produced by hand, sharing it so other people could use it was seen as a gift. Today there is no such incentive. If I pick up some software and find a bug in it or a feature it's missing, I can (have Claude) fix that bug or add that feature, and keep it to myself. Why bother contributing that fix or feature to the world if it's just going to be met with complaints and accusations of it being vibe coded slop? Just as maintainers don't owe me anything, by the rules of the license, if I'm not distributing the binaries, I don't owe the world a public fork of the source code with my changes.

The Winchester mystery house is notable for becoming a public tourist attraction instead of a closed private piece of real estate. How do we evolve the Cathedral and the Bazaar to the modern era? I don't know. I know that my life on my computer is drastically improved by spending an afternoon a week building better tooling for myself, and I realize it's built on top of other's contributions to the world, but at the same time, I don't know how to contribute back under the new regime.

ece• 4 months ago

The movie Winchester, book from a local author (https://www.losaltosonline.com/community/santa-clara-valley-...) and going to the tour itself makes me wonder if Sarah Winchester invites the controversy over why she built the house. What would a rich woman during her time do for fame that outlasts her? Chase crazy architecture ideas if you liked architecture maybe. Make it so the home becomes a public place.

The Winchester house a developer builds is only worth something if it delivers tangible value. The market clearly thinks one way, but plenty of people are still skeptical. The cathedral and bazaar delivered value in different ways, and the need came before the solution.

mrandish• 4 months ago

1,000 lines of code per commit is ~2 magnitudes higher than what a human programmer writes per day.

Relevant historical context: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

When Apple Lisa managers started requiring weekly line-of-code counts in 1982, Bill Atkinson had just rewritten QuickDraw's region engine with a simpler algorithm that was 6× faster and 2,000 lines shorter, so he submitted -2000 on the form. Management quietly stopped asking him to fill it out.

knollimar• 4 months ago

I don't know if I buy the idea that using the vendor parts as examples given in the article align with the analogy.

Architecture is not that; MEP trades aren't architecture. If she used prefabbed wall assemblies or didn't do her own structural for critical parts the analogy would hold (I so not know if she did or did not either way). Plumbing is a completely separate trade the way trading stocks is separate from computing; it just happens to live in the house.

dangoodmanUT• 4 months ago

Don’t try to sell developers the stuff that’s fun, the stuff they want to build. Sell them the stuff they avoid or don’t want to take responsibility for.

I think a lot of people in devtools could learn from this right now

charcircuit• 4 months ago

There is only one source of feedback that moves at the speed of AI-generated code: yourself

Humans are way slower than AI. If you want feedback as fast as AI you are going to need AI for that.

The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

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