I kinda love this. That sounds like an incredibly entertaining place to work for between 1 and 2 years in your late 20s and not a second longer.

With AI "programmers", this will be the future: bugs galore and the things that do work, work by accident.

I think this company was ahead of the curve.

This is awesome. Got completely lost reading this and was struggling to figure out where I got this link from. Amazing story.

This is like the functional ugly tier of buildings from "how buildings learn". Excellent stuff

The blog post is an entertaining read, but I was left with the impression the author might have tried do embellish, particularly in it's disbelief angle.

Take this passage:

> The app relied on a SOAP service, not to do any servicey things. No, the service was a pure function. It was the client that did all the side effects. In that client, I discovered a massive class hierarchy. 120 classes each with various methods, inheritance going 10 levels deep. The only problem? ALL THE METHODS WERE EMPTY. I do not exaggerate here. Not mostly empty. Empty.

> That one stumped me for a while. Eventually, I learned this was in service of building a structure he could then use reflection on. That reflection would let him create a pipe-delimited string (whose structure was completely database-driven, but entirely static) that he would send over a socket.

Classes with empty methods? Used reflection to create a pipe-delimited string? The string was sent over the wire?

Why congratulations, you just rediscovered data transfer objects, specifically API models.