[dahart]

There are multiple metrics to describe what “works” even means. You are right that battle tested code can be more stable and fulfill its goals more than new untested code or code written without a customer. At the same time it’s also true that any sizeable codebase, especially production code, will accumulate bugs over time, will almost always slow down over time, and will eventually once large enough become crufty and smelly and unfactorable and difficult and, maybe most importantly, expensive to maintain. Big systems are hard.