As a programmer myself, I may be a bit biased, but there is little in this world that I'm more sure about than: this wasn't the programmers' fault. It was the management's fault. The management didn't let them improve it. And it was the management who made them use slop machines. The managers probably even thought in terms of "our coders can't fix this" all while tying the developers' hands. And it's very likely that "our coders can't fix this" was a huge part of their fucked-up rationale for forcing their developers to vibe code. But coders know how to code. Making things faster is their bread and butter. Or at least would be if the managers didn't stand in their way.

There's a certain belief among a lot of coders that a rewrite from scratch is never a good approach. "Don't rewrite, refactor." Take it in little chunks and ship-of-theseus your legacy spaghetti code nightmare into something that meets at least some reasonable standard of acceptable quality. They're not wrong per se, but I've many times made impassioned arguments to the contrary. Not because I don't think the "refactor" approach is better in an ideal world, but because our world isn't an ideal one and a rewrite from scratch is a vastly easier sell to a manager than "please can I take just apportion a tiny bit of my time to pay off a little tech debt?" If your dogma is "never rewrite, only refactor", your codebases will be a hopeless mess forever because the refactor never comes. Managers have egos, and a manager wants to have their name associated with "shiny new application" more than "a bunch of boring invisible grunt-work". (Which may not be boring to developers at all, but is boring to higher-up managers and business analysts.) But in this world of AI-psychosis-boggled CTOs, the calculus has changed. The C-levels are even more inclined to want a rewrite, but this time they want to either cut the developers out of the process completely or at least force them into the role of reverse centaur. It's a much dicier proposition these days to propose a rewrite.

I get that sometimes when people say "developers" or "programmers" (especially with video games), they really mean "the development studio" including management, level designers, artists, BSAs, etc. But it's an unfortunate trend.

In summary, tech workers need to unionize STAT. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk ramble.

Have you been watching epic store since it came out?? They don't have programmers. There's no way. Which is, I think, the issue.