zlacker

Exploring a codebase tells you WHAT it's doing, but not WHY. In older codebases you'll often find weird sections of code that solved a problem that may or may not still exist. Like maybe there was an import process that always left three carriage returns at the end of each record, so now you got some funky "lets remove up to three carriage returns" function that probably isn't needed. But are you 100% sure it's not needed?

Same story with data models, let's say you have the same data (customer contact details) in slightly different formats in 5 different data models. Which one is correct? Why are the others different?

Ultimately someone has to solve this mystery and that often means pulling people together from different parts of the business, so they can eventually reach consensus on how to move forward.

>>s5fs+(OP)
Adding that this just gets worse when databases are peppered with direct access by vibe-coded applications that don’t look at production data or gather these insights before deciding “yeah this sounds like the format of text that should go in the column with this name, and that’s the column I should use.”

And now there’s an example in the codebase of what not to do, and other AI sessions will see it, and follow that pattern blindly, and… well, we all know where this goes.