Decouple Everything
The first principle of system design: decouple everything, minimize dependencies.
Every dependency you add is a promise you don’t control. The library updates and breaks your build. The service changes its contract and your calls fail. The black box behaves differently than you assumed, and your system — built on top of a correct reading of an incorrect assumption — slows down, or stops running at all.
Any engineer who has been paged at 2 AM because a third-party dependency changed underneath them learns this in their bones: every coupling is a liability you’ve agreed to carry forever.
The extension
Somewhere along the way I noticed I’d started applying the same principle outside of systems.
Diversify income — don’t let one employer be your single point of failure. Keep stakes small and spread across bets. Don’t let one opinion, one community, or one plan hold everything else up.
I diversified beliefs, too. Holding positions lightly, keeping a little stake in several possibilities rather than everything on one. Not out of indecision — out of the same instinct that says a system with one dependency isn’t resilient, it’s fragile.
The cost
But here’s what the principle doesn’t tell you: hedging has a price, and it compounds.
Spreading small stakes across everything means committing fully to nothing. Diversified friendships become shallow friendships. Diversified beliefs become a hedge against ever standing anywhere. You spend your life minimizing downside and quietly eliminate upside — because upside requires concentration, requires betting big on something, requires coupling yourself to an outcome.
There’s a name for a system with zero dependencies: a system that does nothing. A process fully decoupled from the world can’t be broken by the world, but it also can’t act on it.
Got capital but too afraid to spend it? That’s worse than having no capital. There is no playing safe — “playing safe” is just a bet you didn’t admit to making.
The balance
So the mature version of the principle isn’t decouple everything. It’s: couple deliberately.
Decouple by default, because dependencies accumulate on their own. But when something matters — a person, a belief, a bet — couple fully and accept the fragility as the price of the payoff.
A life optimized against breakage is indistinguishable from a life that already ended. There’s an old saying that captures the other side: live with dignity, or die a martyr — stand for something, or you were never standing at all.
Minimize dependencies. Just don’t minimize them to zero.
Drafted with AI assistance from my personal journal (2026-02-17), then edited by me. See On AI Assistance.