the most politically charged principle in my practice, and the one most directly in tension with dominant tech culture.

the bias toward the new is structural. funding, attention, status, and job titles all flow toward creation and launch, not upkeep. maintainer is not a celebrated role. this is a systematic undervaluation of care work.

maintenance is the majority of the work. for any system that matters and persists, the maintenance phase is longer and more labor-intensive than the build phase. pretending otherwise is the source of enormous accumulated debt.

my decision not to rewrite digital garden every year, to patch rssprint rather than replace it with a framework, and to keep boom as a shell script rather than port it to a proper app are all maintenance-over-innovation decisions. the energy not spent rebuilding is energy available for tending.