The Cathedral, the Bazaar — and now the Winchester Mystery House of code

From two models to a third

In 1998 Eric S. Raymond drew a line in the sand: the Cathedral (planned, closed, tightly managed) vs the Bazaar (open, messy, community-driven). That binary shaped a quarter-century of software culture. But what happens when AI suddenly makes generating code cheap and abundant? We may be moving out of cathedrals and bazaars and into something stranger.

Meet the Winchester Mystery House

Think of Sarah Winchester’s mansion — an architectural fever dream of stairways to nowhere, added rooms, and retrofit solutions fueled by near-unlimited money and a single person’s taste. It’s a vivid metaphor: when tooling is cheap and private constraints loosen, projects accrete in odd, idiosyncratic ways. Not aimless, necessarily. Practical choices, quick fixes, and personal whims stack up until the thing is a labyrinth.

When code is cheap

It has been reported that public GitHub activity attributed to AI models like Claude — visualized by Jodan Alberts and discussed in a recent essay — shows the average net lines added per commit climbing into the neighborhood of ~1,000 lines. If accurate, that’s roughly two orders of magnitude above common human benchmarks. Welcome to rapid prototyping on steroids: lots of assembly, lots of glue code, lots of surprises.

Why this matters

Sprawl isn’t just aesthetic. It brings maintenance debt, fragile integrations, and a security surface that balloons overnight. But there’s an upside: faster experimentation, lower barriers for people to build, and an explosion of novel tooling. The question now is governance — how do we keep the useful mad-science and ditch the haunted corridors? Plenty of us will try to map that mansion as it’s being built.

Sources: dbreunig.com, Lobsters