December 15, 2025
The most dangerous bugs in software aren't the ones that crash your app — they're the ones that slowly make it unmaintainable. Anti-patterns are the design decisions that feel reasonable in the moment but compound into architectural debt that eventually becomes impossible to pay off.
This piece covers the anti-patterns I've seen most commonly in production systems: tight coupling, God objects, premature optimisation, leaky abstractions, and others. Written for engineers who care about building things that last.