Eric S. Raymond's 1997 essay gave us two models for building software. The Cathedral is planned and closed. The Bazaar is open and community-driven, made possible because the internet made communication cheap. Brian Breunig argues we now have a third model: the Winchester Mystery House, named after Sarah Winchester's sprawling mansion. She kept building not from superstition but because she loved architecture and had unlimited money. Today's developers using Coding Agents: The Harness Beats the Model are Sarah Winchester.
The numbers are stark. Claude pushes about 1,000 lines of code per commit, according to data visualized by Jodan Alberts. That's two orders of magnitude beyond what a human writes in a day. Salvatore Sanfilippo, creator of Redis, once calculated his own output at roughly 29 lines per day. Code is effectively free now. But feedback and coordination haven't gotten cheaper. The "eyeballs" that made the Bazaar work can't keep up with AI output.
So developers build sprawling, personalized tools that fit their own needs perfectly. Steve Yegge's Gastown. Jeffrey Emanuel's "FrankenSuite" of Rust rewrites. These projects reflect their creators' tastes. They lack documentation. Outsiders find them inscrutable. And they keep growing because pruning takes effort, and effort is the one thing AI hasn't made cheap.
Open source maintainers are getting hammered. Agent-generated PRs flood repositories, often low quality, often resume padding. Daniel Stenberg killed curl's bug bounty after bad submissions ate reviewer bandwidth. GitHub added a feature specifically to disable PR contributions. One Hacker News commenter cut to the chase: are we building mystery houses, or just houses of cards? 5 AI Technologies to Avoid in 2026