Originally published on Thomas’s Substack. Reproduced from the supplied publication export. Statements and patent-status references reflect the original publication date.
Editorial introduction · added September 17, 2026
Before you read
The medical analogy here describes systems kept running through repeated interventions while the underlying coordination problem persists. The essay asks whether more reconciliation and recovery layers restore coherence or add to the burden. SSOAR is the proposed alternative frame: govern the changing interaction itself so each component need not reconstruct the whole undertaking after the fact.
SSOAR means Session-Scoped Orthogonal Authority and Routing.
Why read it?
- Operations leaders
- Identify when recurring incidents share a structural cause.
- Architecture teams
- Compare improvements to recovery with changes to the governing boundary.
This introduction is separate from the original essay.
Go to the original essay ↓You are not moved to palliative care because things are difficult. You are moved to palliative care when the condition is understood. Not partially. Not optimistically. Fully.
The determination is simple: there is no intervention that restores the system to a prior healthy state. At that point, the objective changes. You do not attempt to cure. You attempt to sustain function for as long as possible.
Distributed systems have reached that point.
For decades, the model was straightforward: When something breaks, you fix it. You isolate the fault. You correct it. You restore the system to a known good state.
Break. Diagnose. Patch. Stabilize.
That model assumes something fundamental: The system can return to coherence. That assumption is no longer true. State does not hold.
Identity shifts mid-interaction.
Policy updates mid-execution.
Context fragments across boundaries.
Workflows do not resolve; they persist.
The system does not pause long enough to be understood. By the time a failure is isolated, the state that produced it has already changed. By the time a correction is applied, it applies to something that no longer exists. The system cannot return to a known good state because that state is no longer reachable.
At that point, the classification changes. The response is predictable: You do not stop. You add.
More orchestration.
More policy layers.
The Death of Coherence
Treatment vs. Management
More retry logic.
More observability.
More control planes.
Each team addresses the failure it can see. Each fix compensates for what the system can no longer do on its own. Each fix introduces new state, new coordination paths, and new dependencies. Every additional subsystem increases the coordination surface. Every increase in coordination surface lengthens reconciliation.
Reconciliation no longer completes.
This is not repair. The method of repair assumes the system can be brought back into alignment; the system cannot. This is where the analogy matters:
Curative treatment attempts to eliminate the cause. Palliative care accepts that the cause cannot be eliminated. It reduces symptoms. It manages decline. It preserves function.
Retries mask inconsistency. Fallbacks mask failure. Circuit breakers mask overload. Observability reconstructs events after they occur. Each one improves the experience. None of them restore coherence.
The reason is structural. When a system must coordinate across independently governed participants, modalities, features, authorities, and transports, the cost of maintaining coherence scales as a product of those dimensions—not a sum.
C_{frag} = k \times P \times M \times F \times A \times T
The Structural Boundary
The system has crossed a boundary. It cannot fully reconcile what it is doing while it is doing it. You are no longer fixing the system; you are sustaining it.
In palliative care, the indicators are known:
Crises arrive more often.
Recovery takes longer.
Periods of stability shorten.
The definition of a “good day” changes.
Distributed systems show the same pattern. Outages become more frequent. Sessions fail mid-interaction. Context loss accelerates. The window in which the system holds a coherent picture of itself contracts. Reconciliation lag grows.
Workarounds become standard procedure. Users adapt behavior. On- call load increases. Runbooks expand. The system functions, but under different expectations.
No one announces the transition. There is no version in which engineering declares the system incurable. The shift happens in practice. Patches ship. Incidents close. Metrics improve against recalibrated baselines that are lower than they once were.
The industry continues to build. Inside each layer, the work appears as progress. Each team improves the symptom it owns. No team is wrong locally. No system is measured as a whole.
The classification has changed. The system is not being fixed. It is being sustained. And like any system in palliative care, the question changes:
The Final Question
Not: Can it be fixed?
But: How long can it be sustained?