Comment by johnnyanmac

I agree on principle, and I'm sure many of us know how much of a pain it is to work on million or even billion dollar codebases, where even small changes can be weeks of beauracracy and hours of meetings.

But with the way the industry is, I'm also not remotely surprised. We have people come and go as they are poached, burned out, or simply life circumstances. The training for the new people isn't the best, and the documentation for any but the large companies are probably a mess. We also don't tend to encourage periods to focus on properly addressing tech debt, but focusing on delivering features. I don't know how such an environment over years, decades doesn't generate so much redundant, clashing, and quirky interactions. The culture doesn't allow much alternative.

And of course, I hope even the most devout AI evangelists realize that AI will only multiply this culture. Code that no one may even truly understand, but "it works". I don't know if even Silicon Valley (2014) could have made a parody more shocking than the reality this will yield.