Comment by turtleyacht
6 days ago
It's still risk though. Consensus distributes it. Future maintainers need to understand the design and motivations.
6 days ago
It's still risk though. Consensus distributes it. Future maintainers need to understand the design and motivations.
That’s not much better in my experience, from a human perspective. You inherit a system that someone designed a decade ago and all the original maintainers are long gone. One is then afraid to change anything, because of ancient landmarks and all that. But now we can actually start to piece together how these things work with AI.
Yes, for legacy--production systems--it's totally useful to generate a high-level overview, surround an unfamiliar feature with tests, and build small harnesses that exercise real functionality.
The sooner one can find an entrypoint, the sooner one can contribute with changes.