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eddythompson80today at 7:48 PM3 repliesview on HN

Pretty normal in many corporate cultures especially ones with high turnover. You get assigned to a team that's "maintaining" a 10 year old code base with few million LoC. The most senior person on the team has been there for a year or 2 and it's just business as usual. You don't know what those 1M+ lines are doing. No one does. It's not a passion of anyone to work on it. You just get a bunch of requirements handed to you, you blackbox everything but the surface areas you need to touch. It's why there are 14 implementations of a background service 8 dependencies that do the same thing, 6 overlapping frameworks, a complete mismatch in style, approaches, etc. It doesn't really matter.


Replies

IshKebabtoday at 10:32 PM

Sounds like a great explanation of why it does matter!

gryntoday at 9:36 PM

> It doesn't really matter.

It does matter, that's why those people quit because it's such a shitshow, progress happens at a glacial pace, more and more defects and slowdowns keep being created even if they have a big QA department/teams and the users are probably trapped because the software is the only thing in town, the bosses are the ones that makes the purchase decisions, or the it comes attached to big and/or expensive machines and they can't just buy another one for another X years.

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egorfinetoday at 9:03 PM

Human-written code is theoretically surmountable.

Large LLM-written code is called slop for a reason. It's hard to understand because oftentimes it does not follow human logic.