---
title: "You Can’t Unboil a Frog – How to Cope When Your Tech Stack is a Hot Mess of Complexity – Encore Blog"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/you-can-t-unboil-a-frog-how-to-cope-when-your-tech-stack-is-a-hot-mess-of-complexity-encore-blog-2utjv4zvp
source_url: https://encore.dev/blog/you-cant-unboil-a-frog
type: article
source: "Encore"
author: "Marcus Kohlberg"
published: 2026-05-31T07:49:04.701Z
updated: 2026-06-01T04:02:06.991Z
tags: ["startup", "productivity", "backend", "technical-debt"]
reading_time: 5
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# You Can’t Unboil a Frog – How to Cope When Your Tech Stack is a Hot Mess of Complexity – Encore Blog

**[Encore](https://daily.dev/sources/encore-blog)** · [@marcuskohlberg](https://daily.dev/marcuskohlberg) · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A reflection on how startup tech stacks gradually accumulate complexity — the 'boiling frog' problem — until team productivity collapses. The author argues that teams often fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy rather than addressing the root cause. The recommended solution is to make bold changes and adopt a fresh stack rather than patching an existing mess. The post uses this framing to introduce Encore, a backend developer platform aimed at reducing complexity through automated DevOps, infrastructure management, and built-in tooling for local development, observability, testing, and documentation.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://encore.dev/blog/you-cant-unboil-a-frog>

---

Tags: [#startup](https://daily.dev/tags/startup), [#productivity](https://daily.dev/tags/productivity), [#backend](https://daily.dev/tags/backend), [#technical-debt](https://daily.dev/tags/technical-debt)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/you-can-t-unboil-a-frog-how-to-cope-when-your-tech-stack-is-a-hot-mess-of-complexity-encore-blog-2utjv4zvp)