Design patterns·The named ways it goes wrong
the configuration grew conditionals and loops, and you realised you had written a programming language, badly.
Inner-platform effect
Also calledinner platform, building a worse version of the platform
Building a system so configurable that it reimplements the platform it runs on, only worse and without its tooling. The classic instances are a database inside a database — key-value tables with a type column — and a rules engine that grows control flow. The tell is that changing behaviour requires editing data rather than code, and that debugging it has no debugger.