Design patterns·The named ways it goes wrong
the first ignored warning became forty, because after the first one nobody felt the file was worth keeping tidy.
Broken window
Also calledbroken windows theory, broken window in code
The observation from The Pragmatic Programmer that visible neglect invites more of it: one unfixed hack, ignored warning or disabled test lowers the standard for everything that follows. It is a claim about people rather than code, which is why it is not fixed by tooling alone — but a build that fails on new warnings is the cheapest available enforcement. It is the mechanism by which technical debt compounds socially rather than technically.