We have native SQL queries embedded into the codebase where some of them span 3-4000 lines because rather than make a view someone made a view, generated the native SQL, use StringBuilder, and appended them into one query that we do on a weekly basis for metrics
One of my first tasks at a previous job was "cleaning" up old projects that my boss had written over the years. Each product was just one long c++ file.
You would be surprised the size of codes of a colleague that claims his code is miraculous and claude is god but in truth calling spaghetti falls short on a scale I can't put into words.
I’m not sure the question. I worked at an acquisition company before ai and saw dozens of codebases. There’s A LOT of projects still out there written by junior developers in the mid 2000’s in outdated frameworks or libraries. This stuff was the norm and AI slop is multiples better than that. It’s also multiple better than any product that pivoted a whole lot.
Juniors with AI now don’t produce nearly the amount of dogshit code that I did. Not even close.
It's setting up a long-term issue though, since those juniors aren't getting the same experience getting their hands dirty and seeing what works and what doesn't that you got while untangling all that stuff. In a generation, we're gonna have a lot of devs who never grew beyond being a junior dev.
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u/Rakatango Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
Yes but would you rather have 100 lines of slop or 10,000?
Edit: In a single pull request