alt Hacker News“Decoherence” denotes a process (losing coherence), not a state, but the article uses it like a state: “Well, for one thing, it creates decoherence.” The state would be “incoherence“ (the lack of coherence).
> the more decoherent a system is,
This should be either “incoherent” (lacking coherence) or “decohered” (having lost coherence).
That being said, yes, incoherence in a system is a form of technical debt, and use of AI for software development comes with a heightened risk of the system becoming incoherent.
Replies
In my experience in academia (although it's been over a decade now) "decoherent" is used as a rough synonym for "decohered".
Agreed! Moreover, the term "decoherence" has a very specific meaning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoherence
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/decoher...
The article’s opening sentence states that it is introducing a new term. So the author gets to define it how they like, and nobody can reasonably complain that this sense of the word isn’t already in the dictionary. Of course it isn’t. It’s an intentional neologism.
The analogy to the term from physics, which is a noun that describes a state, seems clear enough to me. I can’t speak to how apt that analogy may be, but software industry jargon mostly consists of appropriating other fields’ jargon based on inapt analogies, so I’m not sure if it matters.
The everyday meaning of incoherent is more like “meaningless.” For that reason alone I would say it’s a worse word for the concept the author describes.