[chrstphrhrt]

I agree. Especially if there are other teammates who defend the bad codebase because of their association to it.

Nobody should claim washing dishes is inherently wasteful or pointless. Legacy code on the other hand, comes with a lot of social pressure to just layer on more debt.

[devonkim]

Maybe I’m just weird but I’ve never really defended my code because I never found defensiveness to be helpful for moving projects forward. In fact, most of the code I’ve put out in my career has been rushed under pressure to deliver something fast so most of the time I’m distancing myself from the work usually saying “that wasn’t written by me, it was my evil twin that comes out at 2 am.” Trying to fix the problems of the past that keeps your codebase from improving at a better pace isn’t something shameful to me as much as a matter of pride - that you have learned from your mistakes and are not above reproach. The best stuff for me is what I do after iterating many times without fear of breaking anything though and that’s exactly what you would hope from a codebase matured through TDD.