Tesler's Law

Today I learned Tesler’s Law, otherwise known as the law of conservation of complexity.

The law argues that the total complexity in any system is constant. If you were to simplify one component of the system, you would ultimately end up creating more complexity in another component.

As an example of this law, I, a product developer, work with designers to simplify user-facing components of software systems. In other words, we remove complexity from the user-facing parts of these systems. This complexity is not banished from the system, however. Instead, this complexity manifest itself elsewhere in the system, most likely in a complicated API or data model.