work-blog/articles/drafts/regression-as-institutional-memory.md

title	date	topics	related	abstract
Regression as Institutional Memory	2026-04-20	philosophy epistemology craft		A test suite is the codified set of claims an organisation has committed to believing about itself. Every regression failure is either a discovery that the world has changed, or an amnesia event in which we have forgotten why we once believed the claim — and distinguishing the two is the real work.

Regression as Institutional Memory. A test suite is the codified set of claims an organisation has committed to believing about itself. Every regression failure is either a discovery (the world changed) or an amnesia event (we forgot why we believed this). The epistemology angle here is rich — Wittgenstein's On Certainty¹ is a good touchstone. This would also give you a stronger argument than you've yet made for why deleting tests is sometimes the right move.

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1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#OnCe ↩︎