Big Ball of Mud
Noun · Hacker Culture
Definitions
A system with tangled structure, weak boundaries, and accumulated complexity that makes changes unpredictable and costly. In software culture the phrase is a well-known label for organically grown architecture that never got cleaned up.
In plain English: A messy, tangled system with poor structure and hard-to-change code.
Example: "No one planned to build a big ball of mud, but years of urgent patches and copy-paste integrations got them there anyway."