Attractor Engineering: Seeing Software Development as Field Dynamics

TL;DR A codebase can be read as a field that attracts future changes, and a pull request can be read as a force applied to that field. A good field makes good changes easier to make. A bad field repeatedly makes bad shortcuts look natural. In an era where AI can produce PRs quickly, this attraction becomes stronger. I call the practice of designing where future changes are pulled Attractor Engineering. CI/CD, tests, reviews, and harnesses can be read as dissipative systems: they remove unwante...