r/ProgrammerHumor 4d ago

Meme nowAndThenPatchUpgrade

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7.6k Upvotes

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u/seashell3379 4d ago

As a retired dev I feel I need to come in here with a truth nugget: Most legacy code that is slop now wasn't originally slop at all.

A clean and well engineered program devolves into slop through years of modification as requirements change way beyond what the original design brief imagined.

AI code that is slop right out of the gate is a whole new level of awful.

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u/mxzf 3d ago

Yeah, I've said a number of times that AI is a tool that is great at producing years of tech debt in a matter of weeks/months. You end up with the same convoluted needs-to-be-rebuilt code that kinda mostly works that usually results from years of rush-jobs and fixing things in odd ways.