Word or idiom defining something barely functional

Question

How can I refer to something that barely works given a certain context and can get broken at any moment?

The thing is: I wrote some geometry calculations in an application that will work in our context, but any minimum condition can make it fail.

So I typed in the comment:

"... there are precision issues and different contexts that make this algorithm ___________."

A word or an idiom would do.

Answer 1

Related: haphazard. Things are often unreliable because they were improvised or cobbled together in an unsystematic fashion.

That term may come in handy for one of your future commits ;-).

Answer 2

How about brittle?

1a : easily broken, cracked, or snapped
_{definition from m-w.com}

From the "choose the right synonym" section, Merriam-Webster also says:

Fragile, frangible, brittle mean breaking easily. Fragile implies extreme delicacy of material or construction and need for careful handling. Frangible implies susceptibility to being broken without implying weakness or delicacy. Brittle implies hardness together with lack of elasticity or flexibility or toughness.

Adding on to M-W's description, my understanding is that fragile implies that "ordinary handling" (e.g. just picking something up in a casual manner) is likely to cause damage or breakage, while brittle is generally okay with ordinary handling but anything beyond that (e.g. setting it down hard, bumping it) will likely cause damage.

So, if you consider "within your context" to be "ordinary handling", your algorithm works fine here; but trying to apply it to anything outside of that context is likely to cause a problem. Thus you could use "brittle" to describe it.

Answer 3

"unreliable" seems like a good fit.

".. there are precision issues and different contexts that make this algorithm unreliable."

• unreliable - "not able to be trusted to do or provide what is needed or promised" MW

• If you describe a person, machine, or method as unreliable, you mean that you cannot trust them.
  e.g. He had an unreliable car. Collins

Answer 4

I would say "… makes this algorithm precarious"

Precarious: 1) not securely held or in position; dangerously likely to fall or collapse 2) dependent on chance; uncertain

Answer 5

Very close to Hellion's answer of "Brittle" is "Fragile", which I hear in software contexts.

Answer 6

Temperamental is often used this way in a colloquial context. From McMillan Dictionary, as linked above:

[HUMOROUS] used for describing something that often goes wrong or does not work in the way that you expect.

• This photocopier’s a bit temperamental.

Answer 7

The algorithm is flaky. It seems like it ought to work, except that in many weird situations (which you might not fully understand), it gives unwanted results.

Per the Jargon File:

Subject to frequent lossage. This use is of course related to the common slang use of the word to describe a person as eccentric, crazy, or just unreliable. A system that is flaky is working, sort of — enough that you are tempted to try to use it — but fails frequently enough that the odds in favor of finishing what you start are low. Commonwealth hackish prefers dodgy or wonky.

In other words, the algorithm is prone to producing buggy output.

Answer 8

You say it will "work in our context but any minimum condition can make it fail." So why not write that? Why search for something else?

I guess you could also say 'has undergone no testing outside our specific needs'.

Or you do the right thing and fix the function :)

Answer 9

I'd suggest inflexible algorithms

Here some examples from the web:

Online merchants can actually increase their false decline rate (and also reduce sales) by using inflexible algorithms that don’t consider how new data and special circumstances affect a transaction’s legitimacy — like when customers make purchases on an overseas vacation.

---

When faced with an electrocardiographic recoding of a complex arrhythmia, we often use inflexible algorithms or try to recall patterns already seen, which is often insufficient to explain the mechanisms of difficult bradycardias and tachycardias.

---

Another major advantage of evolutionary algorithms is the ease of problem reformulation. In a rapidly changing field, such as genomics, the future use of algorithms may change unpredictably. Furthermore, subtle variations in the specifics of one problem instantiation may make inflexible algorithms less generally useful.

Answer 10

I'd go with "marginal", in the sense of being barely good enough for a given purpose.

Answer 11

"unstable" - Being that your statement appears to be scientific, this would be a classic word to use. An idiom that I believe that is appropriate would be "fast and loose".

Definition: prone to change, fail, or give way; not stable

Answer 12

Situations like the one in your question can be described with the slightly technical term malfunction:

to fail to work or operate correctly

It's usually used in contexts that talk about some sort of mechanical equipment working incorrectly, but I think it is also possible to use this term in the context of computer algorithms. For example:

As of now, the program will likely malfunction and crash if you feed it unsanitized data. So, there still needs to be some work done before calling the program fully functional.

Also, consider the expression go haywire:

to stop working correctly

That one is somewhat similar in spirit to malfunction, but tends to be used in more informal contexts. For example:

Don't run the program yet. It's not in a working state. If you do, it will likely go haywire and make the eintire operating system crash.

Answer 13

How about "close enough for government work":

Good enough; OK; only satisfactory. The phrase implies that government work is usually of mediocre quality. Sufficiently close; done just well enough.

Another relevant link: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/close_enough_for_government_work

Answer 14

I thought I would add On the fritz, even though it doesn't work in the given context (usually it refers to electronic things); it may still help someone else:

On the fritz

Out of order; malfunctioning; broken.

Also robustness is a common metric in computer science, so you may want to just say "It's not very robust"

Answer 15

Here's one I stumbled across in the Entropic package repository documentation:

There are bugs, many unimplemented features, and the whole thing will probably fall over in a stiff breeze.

Answer 16

there are precision issues and different contexts that make this algorithm unpredictable.