Jaco van der Laan

Anti-pattern

Coupled by Default

The anti-pattern: systems reach into each other's internals because nothing stopped them — dependencies nobody declared and nobody can see.

Nobody decided to couple these systems. Nothing prevented it. A report reads a source table directly because it was there. A pipeline joins another team's staging area because it was convenient that sprint. A dashboard depends on a column whose owner has never heard of the dashboard. The dependency is real, load-bearing, and undeclared — which means it is invisible until it breaks, and it breaks at the worst possible moment: when the owner of the upstream, acting entirely reasonably, changes something they had every right to change.

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