The System Was Working as Designed

TECHNICAL PARABLE A TinyCTO.tv technical parable about system design consequences, incentives, operational behavior, architecture accountability. The episode shows that A system working as designed is not good news when the design rewards the wrong behavior.

Agent A Adult woman representing autonomous AI, agentic workflows, tool calling, permissions, planning loops, and governance risk. "The system was working as designed."

The PM Adult professional woman representing alignment, roadmap pressure, prioritization, stakeholder negotiation, and delivery reality. "That should be comforting."

Junior Developer Young adult sincere developer discovering production reality; helper/audience surrogate. "It produced exactly the failure we optimized for."

Tiny CTO Very short adult CTO, title host, narrator, calm adult in chaos, present-tense production-chaos explainer. "Working as designed is not good news when the design rewards the wrong behavior."

Processes help when complexity is real.

TINY CTO LESSON We confuse 'not what we wanted' with 'broken'. Read Full Technical Parable →