(business, software engineering, slang) A cascading chain reaction in which a single non-standard feature, modification, or workaround forces the creation of subsequent custom solutions to maintain compatibility, ultimately resulting in disproportionate complexity and technical debt.
We agreed to build a bespoke UI for that one client, but it turned into a massive custom snowball when we realized our standard backend couldn't process the new inputs.
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(intransitive) To rapidly increase in complexity due to cascading custom requirements.
What started as a quick script completely custom snowballed into a standalone application.
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The vocabulary of software engineers, AI researchers, and anyone living in a terminal or on GitHub — from LLM to MCP, CORS to vibe coding, agentic to enshittification.
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