[Verdex]

Making things worse, I suspect there's at least two (and probably more) definitions for 'clever' that are thrown around and the intent half the time is that one definition is masquerading as the other.

One plausible definition for clever code is that it's code that only works because of a non-obvious dependency on some other fact being true in the code base or outside of the code base. Once the fact is no longer true the code will be broken or subtly broken (or it will break or subtly break other code). "Ah ha, very clever, but we shouldn't do this."

Another plausible definition is approximately, "I don't understand the feature or pattern you're using, and I don't want to understand it or form a coherent argument against it."

[robertlagrant]

The other option is "yes this works well and is very neat, but it's not going to withstand 5 years of people changing it and only reviewing the diffs."

[sfn42]

Does anything withstand that? I don't think that's the responsibility of the original author, I think it is the responsibilities of all those devs and reviewers to make sure changes make sense and don't make the system worse.

Nothing can stop morons from ruining good code. Good devs will evolve code into something that makes more sense.

[ravenstine]

The only code that probably does withstand it is code that does its job so thoroughly from its inception that there becomes no reason for someone to frequently make changes to it. I know such code exists because I definitely have run into code in popular repos that hasn't been touched in 10+ years. This is not exactly the norm though, particularly within web development, it seems. The more developers and reviewers you introduce to a unit of code, the more chaos you introduce, and said code is liable to losing comprehension until a major rewrite is performed.