You gave them a 'freeform' field. They built an API inside it.

Tell a programmer “use the API as provided” and you will learn what programmers do when handed a perfectly permissive blank slate: they build a language inside the notes field.

Here’s the neat little model: product manager wants no extra work and plausible deniability; users want data to live where it’s convenient; developers want to ship. Give them a “freeform, user-definable” field and a “Final” checkbox, and the equilibrium is inevitable. As one redditor put it, “Marking anything as ‘Final’ automatically dooms it to immediate updates.” That sentence is both diagnosis and punchline.

Consequences follow predictably and creatively. Freeform becomes a decentralized protocol—people put structured payloads where nobody expected them (one commenter joked about encoding atom charges in the occupancy field; another predicted the next patch would “just limit the number of characters on the notes field”). The system didn’t break because of malice; it broke because incentives routed complexity into the path of least resistance: the empty textbox.

If you want a formal clause for your product charter: “Clause 1.2 — The Freeform Fallacy: introducing an unconstrained input field establishes, by market forces, an unofficial API.” It’s not bad design so much as a contract between laziness, creativity, and version control. Efficient, in a certain mathematical sense of “efficient”—minimal upfront effort, maximum future surprises.