“Every system is shaped by the human drive to do less work. This is not a flaw. It is the economic force that produces all software — and all software failure.”
Every pattern in this museum exists because a human made a reasonable choice to do less work. Two-digit years saved two columns on a punch card. String concatenation was faster than learning prepared statements. Trusting the cookie meant not building a token system. The six laws describe how systems fail. Katie's Law describes why humans build them that way. It is the gravity beneath the geology — the force that creates the layers this museum teaches you to read.
Patterns do not exist in isolation. Each connection reveals how one failure enables, evolves into, or mirrors another. Click a class above to filter.
Mitigation does not remove a pattern. It relocates it. Each fix reduces exposure but introduces new assumptions. When those assumptions fail, the pattern re-emerges — often in a context the mitigation was not designed for. The AI era does not create new failure modes. It provides new execution contexts for the same six laws.