A 1972 Paper Predicted the AI Coding Crisis. Nobody Listened.

There's a paper from 1972 that describes - with precision - the crisis AI coding agents are creating right now. David Parnas published "On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules" when software ran on mainframes and a large program was 10,000 lines. The paper argued that the conventional way of breaking systems apart (by execution steps: input → process → output) was wrong, and that systems should instead be decomposed by design decisions that are likely to change. The reason was human cognition. Not compiler efficiency. Not runtime performance.