The state modeling iron law that could have saved investors millions on Miro
jimmykoppel · x · 2026-09-12
Jimmy Koppel revives his 2022 essay 'State of emergency!' to explain the software iron law that could have saved investors from losing big on Miro.
Key points:
- Good engineers make illegal states unrepresentable
- Great engineers also eliminate Missing states (missing representations), Redundant states (two ways to represent the same thing), and Overloaded states (one representation carrying multiple meanings)
- State spans levels — the real world, abstract state, and program state — and modeling bugs come from conflating them
He argues Miro's failure traces to violating this law, a lesson investors ignored.
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