Clarke's third law

expression

ops culture

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'

Arthur C. Clarke's third law was written about prophecy and progress, but engineering adopted it as a diagnosis: when users, or engineers, cannot see the mechanism, they reason about the system with superstition instead of models. That is where cargo-cult fixes, ritual reboots, and 'it works, don't touch it' come from. The working corollary for practitioners: any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced, and any team treating its own stack as magic is insufficiently informed.

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