Draft, September 2026

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Act 1, scene 2: Special cases accumulate

The explainer video for the paper SaaS architecture when code is cheap
Transcript

Scene 2: Special cases accumulate

When a customer asks for something the configuration did not anticipate, a deadline usually comes with it, and the quickest answer is a special case in shared code. In one large family of industry surveys, time pressure is the most cited cause of technical debt. In a multi-tenant product, every tenant carries every special case.

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