What TFA is arguing is that never before we had a trend towards Bus Factor zero. Before, the worst was often 1 (occasionally zero, of course, but now TFA argues we're aiming for zero whether we're aware or not).
Spot on. 1 might as well be zero. Totally unfair to the worker also, who now cannot take time off.
I considered it a success when I realized a company doesn’t need me anymore and I can move on and talk about what I did at my next interview in STAR format.
This is precisely why the term "Bus Factor" was invented: to point out when it's 1, because it's both high risk to the company and unfair to the dev that cannot go on vacation or extended time off.
A Bus Factor of 0, especially as an implicit goal, seems doubly worrisome! Now it's a goal rather than a warning sign.
I solve this by sufficient compartmentalization with good inter-component interfaces. Worst case, you excise part of your system and rebuild. Possibly you can take the schema and docs and rebuild with an LLM :-)
I talk about this in my upcoming book on the topic (link above.) Most good systems are rebuilt 3 or 4 times anyway.
Shameful plug, i've been writing a book on this with my retrospective as a CTO building like this. I just updated it so you can choose your price (even $0) to make this a less shameful plug on HN: https://ctoretrospective.gumroad.com/l/own-your-system
I dont think anyone has the perfect answer, yet, but LLM-built systems arent that different from having the system built by 10 diff people on eLance/Upwork/Fiverr...so the principles are the same.