The Amber Trap
Martijn Veldkamp
“Strategic Technology Leader | Customer’s Virtual CTO | Salesforce Expert | Helping Businesses Drive Digital Transformation”
August 29, 2025
Last week I was cleaning out some old project folders (a therapeutic exercise I recommend to any one). I learned that from a fellow architect. Does this spark joy? Anywho, I stumbled upon a perfectly preserved architecture document from 2018. Complete with detailed diagrams, stakeholder matrices, and decision rationales that read like artifacts from a lost civilization. The document was comprehensive! And absolutely useless for understanding that current system. It had become digital amber. Beautiful preserved, but tragically misleading.
This got me thinking about my previous article on the contextual decay in software systems. While that article focused on how LLMs miss the living context around code, there’s another phenomenon at play. Sometime we do preserve context, but it fossilizes into something that actively misleads rather than informs.
The Dominican Republic of Documentation
In the mountains of the Dominican Republic, amber deposits contain some of the most perfectly preserved specimens in the natural world. Insects trapped in tree resin millions of years ago look as fresh as if they died yesterday. Their delicate wing structures, compound eyes, and even cellular details remain intact. It’s breathtaking. It’s also a snapshot of a world that no longer exists. And people pay serious money for these risk fraught mined specimens, that is a comple other rabbit hole. Yes I ended up on catawiki.
The forest that produced that resin is gone. The ecosystem those insects lived in has vanished. TThe amber preserves the form perfectly while the function has become irrelevant.
The Amber Trap: When Context Gets Fossilized
This leads me to a fourth law, a corollary to Contextual Decay. I call it
The Amber Trap: A system’s context, when perfectly preserved without evolving, becomes a liability that actively harms its future development.
In my previous article, I argued that code repositories are like dinosaur skeletons. All structure but miss the context. Documentation was supposed to be that soft tissue, filling in the gaps with the why behind the what. But here’s what I’ve realized: soft tissue doesn’t just decay it sometimes it mummifies.
Real soft tissue decomposes quickly, which is actually helpful. It forces paleontologists to constantly seek new evidence, to challenge their assumptions, to remain humble about their reconstructions. See https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2025/august/bizarre-armoured-dinosaur-spicomellus-afer-rewrites-ankylosaur-evolution.html
Outdated Architecture Decisions
I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly across organizations:
The Authentication Fossil: A security architecture document from 2019 explaining why we chose a custom JWT implementation instead of OAuth because “we need fine-grained control and the OAuth landscape is too fragmented.” Today, that same custom implementation is our biggest security vulnerability, but new developers read the document and assume there’s still a good reason for not using industry standards.
The Database Decision Artifact: Documentation explaining why we chose MongoDB because “we need to move fast and can’t be constrained by rigid schemas.” The current system now has more validation rules and data consistency requirements than most SQL databases, but the document makes it seem like any proposal to add structure is fighting against architectural principles.
