linuss-lawlisted

# Linus's Law > "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." > — Attributed to Linus Torvalds; popularized by Eric Raymond in *The Cathedral and the Bazaar*, 1999 ## The core idea When enough people examine a codebase, bugs that might seem deeply hidden to any individual reviewer will be found. What's opaque to one person is obvious to another. Different reviewers bring different mental models, experiences, and areas of focus. This is the argument for both code review and open source development as quality mechanisms. ## Why more eyeballs help **Cognitive diversity.** Different reviewers think differently. One person might miss an off-by-one error; another will spot it immediately. One reviewer notices the security implication that the author never considered. **Assumption blindness.** Authors are blind to their own assumptions. You can't see what you took for granted. A reviewer who doesn't share those assumptions sees the gap. **Familiarity blindness.** After staring at code, you read what you meant to write, not what you wrote. Fresh eyes catch typos in variable names, wrong constants, and logic inversions that authors routinely miss. **Specialization.** A security engineer reviewing code finds different bugs than a performance engineer or a domain expert. Broader review coverage is richer review. ## Practical implications for teams **Make code review a non-negotiable practice.** The research on code review is clear: it is one of the highest-ROI quality practi