The Model Code Gap

> The reality of generating diagrams from code is that although you’ll generate diagrams that are a 1:1 accurate representation of your infrastructure and source code, they likely won’t be very useful for your team

See also the Borges short story On Exactitude in Science:

> ...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. [^0]

More problematically, it's generally the case that more than one abstraction is possible and the available evidence can't on its own decide which is better.[^1]

(This title should probably be hyphenated as in the original source: "Model-Code Gap" reads as in "gap between model and code" as opposed to "the gap which can be found in code which could serve as a model".)

[^0]: https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf [^1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermina...

I think the term “accidental complexity” relates to this concept. The architectural model would be the “accidental” part, that is, in a magical world the business model would execute correctly without any need to tie it into the architecture, and thus there would be no “gap” between the models, and no need for some kind of tool to generate the architectural model’s code.

This brings us to the non-magical world where we have to ask if we even want to completely automate (ignore) the architectural model.