[dgb23]

It’s not exclusively used for clever code.

I think a more common case for the term is to describe a program/system that covers way more ground than it needs to in terms of abstraction, tooling, features, scalability and performance.

Example: I handed off a website a year ago that didn’t have any sort of remarkable engineering/usage requirements on the backend side. Internal operations of our client however insisted on deploying it on a kube cluster, so we had to accommodate for that. All they actually needed was maybe some caching, if at all.

Mild case, but I think of these types of stories when thinking of “over engineering”.