Something that I see occasionally cropping up is an interpretation of "anarchist software development" that boils down to "code as small as possible, no dependencies".

While yes, it is desirable to keep code approachable, this particular interpretation bothers me, and I do not believe it is a good example of anarchist praxis.

Society is complicated, and societal systems are complicated. The "minimalism" interpretation to me is the software equivalent of anarcho-primitivism; rather than recognizing where minimalism is or isn't appropriate, it instead tries to ignore the complexity of the entire system, pretending that everything could or should be reduced down to simple systems.

A successful implementation of anarchism is not one that has minimalism as a prerequisite; for anarchism to be successful, it *must* be able to deal with complexity of systems and social relations in *some* way.

That doesn't mean it need to accept complexity in any and all places where it occurs; but in *some* undefined subset of situations, complexity is going to be unavoidable, and solutions will be needed for that.

To take software dependencies as a concrete example (but it is not limited to that); is building up a healthy culture around collaboration through dependencies not an excellent example of something that anarchism *should* be good at, rather than wholesale rejecting the notion of such collaboration at all?

If it is believed impossible to make such collaboration possible within an anarchist context, is that not an indictment of anarchism as a social ideology? Is that not the view that is supported by rejecting the concept of dependencies in its entirety?