Elfi is a Ragdoll cat who lives with software architect Ralf D. Müller. She has opinions about software development. This is her column.
We got a household robot this week. Very eager. On its first evening it found an old note in a drawer, written by my humans before I moved in: "No cat on the sofa."
How this house actually works
Nobody has followed that note for years. I have slept on the left cushion every evening since my first winter here. There is a blanket that lives there just for me, and there are photos of me on it. That is how this house actually works.
The robot does not care how the house works. It believed the paper and lifted me off the sofa with a polite little beep. Then it pinned the note to the wall, so the next helper would believe it too.
A heresy, apparently
Ralf says a man on a podcast has a word for this: a heresy. An old, wrong rule that sits written down somewhere, and every new helper reads it and follows it again. Ralf calls it a documentation problem. I call it a staffing problem.
My proposal
The note goes in the bin and the blanket stays where it is. Years on that cushion are precedent. A forgotten piece of paper is not.
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