the.com/workaround
A permanent solution's shy, temporary cousin who never leaves.
means A workaround is a makeshift method for getting something done despite a flaw or obstacle you haven't actually fixed.
from A straightforward 20th-century compound of 'work' plus 'around' — to work around an obstacle rather than through it. It took hold with the rise of computing and engineering culture, where patching a bug properly could take ages, but routing around it could happen today. No hidden backstory here — the word means exactly what it looks like, which is part of why it spread so fast.
- origin
- NASA engineers coined it for space hacks
- lifespan
- outlives the bug it was patching
- tech debt
- every codebase runs on three of these
- honesty
- admits the real fix got deprioritized