Comment by apimade
6 days ago
All code is legacy code.
And as someone who’s reviewed plenty of production scripts, functions, and services written by junior developers, including my own early work, this take is overly absolutist.
The problem persists in the vast majority of organisations.
You can write articles criticising LLM-generated code, but if you’ve spent most of your career fixing, extending, or re-architecting systems built by others, you should know better.
Until software engineering adopts the same standards, certifications, consistency, and accountability as traditional engineering, along with real consequences, these arguments don’t hold much weight.
This entire modern industry was built on the opposite philosophy: agile. Move fast, break things. Ship iteratively with minimal design. Drop production? Just revert. Outage? Oops.
Software is still treated like a toy. It’s playdough in the hands of toddlers led by other toddlers. You might be among the 1% who do things properly.. but the other 99% don’t.
And odds are, if you’re reading this, you’re not the 1%.
I see that you're not alone in your position clearly, but still, this is such a strange take to me. Do people not seriously not see, nay, instinctively understand the ontological difference between the difference between using code someone no longer understands and deploying code no one ever understood?
I'm not saying the code should be up to any specific standards, just that someone should know what's going on.
I don't actually see the difference. If someone writes the code and understands it but then becomes unavailable, what's the practical difference with no one having understood it?
Someone at some point had a working mental model of the code and a reputation to protect and decided that it was good enough to merge. Someone vetted and hired that person. There's a level of familiarity and history that leads others to extend trust.
3 replies →
One of the implementations underwent analysis.
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Agreed with you. I've always told people all code "rusts" (not a language reference) - in multiple ways: the original author's mental model, the contributors, institutional knowledge, and the supporting ecosystem and dependencies. All code atrophies towards being legacy and debt. The more the worse. AI Vibe coding simply creates much more of it, much faster.
piggybacking on everything you said, which is all true: Code is not a science, despite what pedants would have you believe. The annoying answer to "what's correct" code is, "it depends." Code is just a tool used to achieve a goal.