Fixpoints, Not Fixes: In Depth

Simplification done wrong generates compound debt in the engineering record. This paper examines five production lifecycle failures in a real codebase — background tasks that escape to asyncio, semaphores held across unbounded waits, SSE zombie connections, publish-before-subscribe races, and invariants encoded only in comments — and argues that each represents a system finding its own fixpoint in the absence of one the engineer forgot to name.