The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

Our era of sprawling, idiosyncratic tooling

In 1998, Eric S. Raymond published the founding text of open source software development, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. In it, he detailed two methods of building software:

The Cathedralmodel is carefully planned, closed-source, and managed by an exclusive team of developers.The Bazaarmodel is open, transparent, and community-driven.

The Bazaar model was enabled by the internet, which allowed for distributed coordination and distribution. More people could contribute code and share feedback, yielding better, more secure software. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” Raymond wrote, coining Linus’ Law.

The ideas crystallized in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” helped kick off a quarter-century of open source innovation and dominance.

But just as the internet made communication cheap and birthed the Bazaar, AI is making code cheap and kicking off a new era filled with idiosyncratic, sprawling, cobbled-together software.

Meet the third model: the Winchester Mystery House.

The Winchester Mystery House

Located less than 10 miles southeast from the Computer History Museum, the Winchester Mystery House is an architectural oddity.

Following the death of her husband and mother-in-law, Sarah Winchester controlled a fortune. Her shares in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and the dividends they threw off, made it so Sarah could not only live in comfort but pursue whatever passion she desired. That passion was architecture.

Sarah didn’t build her mansion to house ghosts1, she built her mansion because she liked architecture. With no license, no formal training, in an era when women (even very rich women) didn’t have a path to practicing architecture, Sarah focused on her own home. She made up for her lack of license with passion and effectively unlimited funds.

Sarah built what she wanted. “At its largest the house had ~500 rooms.” Today it has roughly 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens. Carved wood drapes the walls and ceilings. Stained glass is everywhere. Projects were planned, completed, abandoned, torn down, and rebuilt.

It was anything but aimless. And practical innovations ran throughout, including push-button gas lighting, an early intercom system, steam heating, and indoor gardens. The oddities that amuse today’s visitors were mostly practical accommodations for Sarah’s health (stairways with very small steps), functional designs no longer used (trap doors in greenhouses to route excess water), or quick fixes to damage from the 1906 earthquake.

Winchester passed in 1922. Nine months later, the house became a tourist attraction.

Today, many programmers are Sarah Winchester.

What Happens When Code is Cheap

We aren’t as rich as Sarah Winchester, but when code is this cheap, we don’t need to be.

Jodan Alberts illustrated this recently, collecting and visualizing data detailing public Github commits attributed to Claude Code. That’s his data in the chart above, with Claude seeming to only accelerate through March2.

It’s hard to get a handle on individual usage, though, so I went searching for a proxy and landed on the chart below:

After Opus 4.5 and recent work enabling Agent Teams, the average net lines added by Claude per commit is now smooth and steady at 1,000 lines of code per commit3.

1,000 lines of code per commit is ~2 magnitudes higher than what a human programmer writes per day.

If you search for human benchmarks, you’ll find many citing Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month while claiming a good engineer might write 10 cumulative lines of code per day4. If you further explore, you’ll find numbers higher than 10 cited, but generally less than 100.

Here’s a good anecdote from antirez on a Hacker News thread discussing the Brooks “quote”:

I did some trivial math. Redis is composed of 100k lines of code, I wrote at least 70k of that in 10 years. I never work more than 5 days per week and I take 1 month of vacations every year, so assuming I work 22 days every month for 11 months:

70000/(22 x 11 x 10) = ~29 LOC / dayWhich is not too far from 10. There are days where I write 300-500 LOC, but I guess that a lot of work went into rewriting stuff and fixing bugs, so I rewrote the same lines again and again over the course of years, but yet I think that this should be taken into account, so the Mythical Man Month book is indeed quite accurate.

6 years after this comment, Claude is pushing 1,000 lines of code per commit.

So what do we do with all this cheap code?

Unfortunately, everything else remains roughly the same cost and roughly the same speed. Feedback hasn’t gotten cheaper; the “eyeballs” that guided the software developed by the bazaar haven’t caught up to AI.

There is only one source of feedback that moves at the speed of AI-generated code: yourself. You’re there to prompt, you’re there to review. You don’t need to recruit testers, run surveys, or manage design partners. You just build what you want, and use what you build.

And that’s what many developers are doing with cheap code: building idiosyncratic tools for ourselves, guided by our passions, taste, and needs.

Sound familiar?

Welcome to the Mystery House

Steve Yegge’s Gastown is a Winchester Mystery House. It’s incredibly idiosyncratic and sprawling, rich with metaphors and hacks. It’s the perfect tool for Steve.

Jeffrey Emanuel’s Agent Flywheel is a Winchester Mystery House. A significant subset of tokenmaxxers decide they need to rebuild their dependencies in Rust; Jeff is one such example. His “FrankenSuite” includes Rust rewrites of SQLite, Node, btrfs, Redis, Pandas, NumPy, JAX, and Torch.

Philip Zeyliger noted the pattern last week, writing, “Everyone is building a software factory.” But it goes beyond software. Gary Tan’s personal AI committee gstack is a Winchester Mystery House constructed mostly from Markdown.

Everywhere you look, there are Winchester Mystery Houses.

Each Winchester Mystery House is idiosyncratic. They are highly personalized. The tightly coupled feedback loop between the coding agent and the user yields software that reflects the developer’s desires. They usually lack documentation. To outsiders, they’re inscrutable.

Winchester Mystery Houses are sprawling. Guided by the needs of the developer, these tools tend to spread out, constantly annexing territory in the form of new functions and new repositories. Work is almost always additive. Code is added when it’s needed, bugs are patched in place, and countless appendages remain. There’s little incentive to prune when code is free.

And building a Winchester Mystery House should be fun. Coding agents turn everything into a sidequest, and we eagerly join in. Building the perfect workflow is a passion for many devs, so we keep pushing.

Winchester Mystery Houses are idiosyncratic, sprawling, and fun. But does this mean we’re abandoning the bazaar?

What Happens to the Bazaar?

What happens when we all tend to our Mystery Houses? When our free time is spent building tools just for ourselves, will we stop working on shared projects? Will we abandon the bazaar?

Probably not. The bazaar is packed right now, but not in a good way.

Code is cheap, so people are slamming open source repositories with agent-written contributions, in an attempt to pad their resumes or manifest their pet features. Daniel Stenberg ended bug bounties for curl after a deluge of poor submissions sapped reviewer bandwidth. It’s gotten so bad, Github recently added a feature to disable pull request contributions.

Anecdotally, I’m seeing good contributions pick up as well. They’re just drowned out by the slop. For what it’s worth, curl commits are dramatically up in the agentic era. And people are sharing what they build. A recent analysis by Dumky shows more packages and r