Ngl that's like baby levels of nasty code. The real nasty shit is the stuff with pointless abstractions and call chains that make you question your sanity. Stuff that looks like it's only purpose was to burn the clock and show off a niche language feature. Or worse than that even is when the project you inherit has decade old dependencies that have all been forked and patched by the old team

If all I had to worry about was organization and naming I'd be over the moon

Even worse than there being no comments: the code is extensively commented, but its function has drifted from what the comments describe to the point where they are actively misleading.

longest file I have ever maintained contained 50,000 lines of code.

fifty THOUSAND.

forgive me for not weeping for 2000 lines.

my advice, don't fucking touch it. pull out as much functionality out of it into other things over time.

there will come a day when you can throw it away. maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow... but some day.

Jesus i worked at exactly this kind of project once. The only other dev was also very hostile and protective of this position. He did not want me there in the slightest. Took about 6 months before we cancelled the contract since this dude was just actively harrassing me in Teams DMs on the daily and he just ignored all my concerns regarding maintainability since "he could understand the code" and i was probably just "not experienced enough".

Don't downplay what this does to your mental health. 5 years of workplaces like this and I'm now starting to see a therapist due to exhaustion disorder symptoms in my goddamn 20s. Take care our there!

I literally told my boss that I was just going to rebuild the entire pipeline from the ground up when I took over the codebase. The legacy code is a massive pile of patchwork spaghetti that takes days just to track down where things are happening because someone, in their infinite wisdom, decided to just pass a dictionary around and add/remove shit from it so there is no actual way to find where or when anything is done.

I was part of project that scoffed at the idea documenting code. Comments were also few and far between. In retrospective, it really seemed like they wanted to give that elitist feel because everything reeked of wanting to keep things under wraps despite everything being done out in the freakin' open.

The language is COBOL.

Hey! This was my first real job. Is Matlab code written by physicists who just recently learned programming.

I just inherited my first codebase a few months ago. It's like this everywhere and original developer was fired, so what should sometimes be a simple fix turns into a full day of finding what needs to change. Any recommendations on fixing/maintaining code like this or should I just make it the next person's problem?

ARGH this triggered a bit of PTSD for me....

"We're going to convert these COBOL applications to C#, and you need to test that the new application works exactly the same, including the same bugs as the old application."
"Ok, where's the specifications and test reports of the old COBOL applications?"
"They were lost to time, we don't know where they are."
"Ok, so how are the developers going to write the C# code?"
"They're going to read the COBOL scripts and recreate them into C#, we advise you do the same."

Cue me spending a month trying to decypher the COBOL gobbledigook into inputs and outputs, and write testcases based on that. And after that month was up, and I had delivered my testcases, they told me that my services were no longer needed.

I'll get shit on for suggesting it but this is a great use case for AI: comment the code and generate some basic docs. Even if it's wrong it'll give you a sense of where to start looking for flows.

You got 3 letters?! Luck!

I worked at a japanese company whose engineers we're former NTT developers. Copypasta (i.e. not using functions), inefficient algos, single-letter var names, remote code execution from code as root, etc. good times!

Oh, it's only the files that have over 2k lines of code? Hell, I'll take that over what I'm dealing with now. I've got multiple FUNCTIONS that are over 2k lines. >:(

Time to go around commenting stuff yourself!

There are no comments in the code

At my last job, I was assigned to a project being run by a straight-out-of-college developer who felt that not only were comments unnecessary, they were actually a "code smell", a sign of professional incompetence on the part of whoever added them. It's an insane philosophy that could only appeal to people who have never had to take over an old codebase.

That's what agentic AI is for! Your OS will figure out by itself what you are doing and weave together a shambolic rococo digital house of cards that will be not just undocumented but utterly incomprehensible.

It's fine, just get a 5GHz CPU with 48 cores, 1TB of DDR5 HBM super RAM, and maybe a few petabytes of storage (in the cloud in a flatpack Docker that runs on a VM), so that you can finally make that button blue.

I've been doing this for years at my current job. It has become a masterpiece of refactoring and comments. They weren't even asking the right questions. I'm very proud of myself.

So naturally, I'm about to get fired and have the whole thing redone by AI.

Bonus frame:

The 2000 line file is one function

I didn't even know we were hiring ...

I’m dealing with this currently. Thank you all for confirming that I’m not crazy

Then you fix 90% of a problem and get blamed when the rest of 10% doesn't work

That time I started a new job and my first task was "fix bash"...and then I discovered a multi megabyte monstrosity called "bash.sh"

Honest question: would an LLM be able to write useful comments in code like this?

"Code IS documentation"

The only experience I have like this is when I wanted to see how the ARMA Life mod was doing certain things, but it was programmed by like 20 different people in 3 different languages. Most of it was in German and French.

It was easier to just to find my own way of doing what I wanted to do.

"Documenting the code base will be your first task for the next month to help show us how well you understand the codebase."