Actively trying to fight against this now. Crazy huge amount of tech debt with 3 separate rewrites inside one unified monolith repository. Management could only be convinced to let engineering move forward with features on a new platform so now we have periods of code for each rewrite that contain certain features.

With more disciplined engineers we are slowly cleaning it up but it is taking years to realize because management won’t allow work to be stopped on feature development. If we’re lucky, we get two sprints a year to fix things, usually around holidays when half the team is afk anyway so not a huge chunk can be fixed. Then on top of all of that, if you break something when trying to Boy Scout rule improve things, you get chastised and management clamps down more on “scope creep”.

Add in LLMs and now engineering management is convinced that they will solve our problems. Except it can’t really because the project is so spread out and disjointed that it’s impossible to reason about. You’d spend tens of dollars just to have it follow all possible branches of our most critical user flows (and then with hallucinations on top!).

I’m not saying the bots aren’t useful, but they cannot comprehend a disaster zone architecture in anything more than extremely targeted chunks. Without being able to see the entire thing, having it reliably refactor is just not possible without weeks of manual testing or taking a risk and being prepared to rollback on short notice. Writing tests would also take many weeks and if the point is to rearchitect to something sane, a snapshot test is not really going to cut it.

It’s a pickle of a problem for sure… and I’m not sure I will survive at this company long enough to see the end (though I’ve been here years already).