I asked claude 4.0 to rate a project written by the CTO that I am supposed to maintain solo (have been doing so for a while now - other projects aren't better)
I asked claude 4.0 to rate a project written by the CTO that I am supposed to maintain solo (have been doing so for a while now - other projects aren't better)
(I took the last summary part only for obvious reasons)
Result is hilarious but I couldn't agree more. Here's the prompt:
what's your overall view of this project? what major design flaws do you see or good design decisions you like? be brutal, reality check time
edit: clarification before you guys jump me, the company paid for agentic editing to give it a shot and this is the first thing I asked
My current hobby project is over 4000 lines of perl at this point and not with a single comment in the source. I asked ChatGPT to evaluate the code base, and the only negative feedback was my preference for my ancient way of doing this one specific thing when there's a module that handles it these days.
This project is 6x bigger than that 🙁 (~ 25k loc)
And worst of all: written by someone else.
I once worked on web forms project that was a port of VB6 with ~20k lines on both the markup and code behind files...per page.
But not to go into war stories. And no, nobody really knew what it did, which made rewriting virtually impossible haha.
edit: clarification before you guys jump me, the company paid for agentic editing to give it a shot and this is the first thing I asked
Then I shall refrain from it.
But what's wrong with active development on a legacy code base? Sure those FIXMEs and TODOs should be cleaned up as that's obvious tech debt, but besides that?
CTOs are not architects, so much is clear and this project shows issues running deep in your companies culture.
But what’s wrong with active development on a legacy code base? Sure those FIXMEs and TODOs should be cleaned up as that’s obvious tech debt, but besides that?
I don't think FIXMEs & TODOs are a problem either if you have a system on how to deal with them over time..
CTOs are not architects, so much is clear and this project shows issues running deep in your companies culture.
How could you tell? because yes, everything turns into a dick measuring contest (in PRs)
I have a LinkedIn alert for CTO jobs and for weeks they've been nothing but "founders" wanting someone to build a "next gen crypto trading platform" for no pay
There is a rush for some countries to have their own exchangers to convert local residents for tax & fraud reasons. But if I am to build such a large complex system on my own, I would just have it all.