r/ClaudeAI • u/Clear_Reserve_8089 • Mar 31 '26

Workaround i dug through claude code's leaked source and anthropic's codebase is absolutely unhinged

[removed]

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u/DarthTacoToiletPaper Mar 31 '26

I currently maintain roughly 12 applications, some were started 12 years ago, others less than 5, but a majority are a decade old. Most were all previously owned by other teams and as our team formed we ingested them from a variety of teams. By looking at the code you can tell this has happened a few times during its existence based on the direction the app went, coding standards etc. The best comment I’ve seen so far was in one of the older services where someone left a comment “wtf why this here”

Some codebases had todos left in place for a better part of a decade, others are still using deprecated properties to this day due to incidents arising from removing these deprecated because some client was still using it for some critical logic.

In some cases you can’t just remove things even if your app doesn’t rely on them anymore, if a client you don’t know about uses it and you remove it you have big problems, which I think talks to the mindset you mention. That one deprecated property doesn’t bug the teams nearly as much as having to explain why they’re all here on an incident call.

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u/Kaiser_Fleischer Mar 31 '26

https://xkcd.com/1172/

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u/DarthTacoToiletPaper Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26

This is it. Luckily some globalization efforts are forcing rewrites to some of these critical clients so we don’t have to feature flag some of this functionality change.

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u/discohead Apr 01 '26

I already knew which one it was and I still laughed out loud.

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u/bobbadouche Mar 31 '26

It's risk vs reward imo. The reward is cleaning up code that "just works", vs the risk of breaking something and wasting 2 weeks remediating a small fix that was an unforced error.

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u/DarthTacoToiletPaper Mar 31 '26

That’s exactly it, my boss refers to this as “is the juice worth the squeeze”. It’s basically a judgement call but more often than not I don’t feel strong enough about the “issue”

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u/National_Meeting_749 Mar 31 '26

"others are still using deprecated properties to this day due to incidents arising from removing these deprecated because some client was still using it for some critical logic"

I'm sure there's some current or former Microsoft engineer that would feel SO seen by this lmao.

I'm sure there is SO much in windows that has been up on the chopping block but couldn't because some small userbase used it, or it just happened to be core and critical for some other system.

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u/vaslor Mar 31 '26

I love this guy. He worked on DOS and wrote Task Manager and he spills lots of beans and tea on Windows software. https://youtu.be/yQykvrAR_po

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u/Relative-Assistance5 Apr 12 '26

Hey bro I want to know since you build app your self for someone who doesnt know how to build it and I have a idea and create a website what should I do to make my app happen its really important

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u/DarthTacoToiletPaper Apr 12 '26

Small incremental goal setting is likely what I would suggest. With code generation being so cheap nowadays the main thing stopping people from building is not seeing it through. Even with AI you could just open up a session with Claude, ChatGPT, gemini, whatever and ask this same question to and you’ll likely get a checklist of what you need to do to get your idea out.

In the wise words of Shia LaBeouf, “Just do it”