[capableweb]

Yes, this! People tend to forget when reviewing code long after it was written, that there is a lot of context around code that isn't "codified".

I remember looking once at a project me and some others got pulled into, where everything was working but the code was spaghetti (which, to be fair, is usually why I get pulled in), and they were having a hard time adding new features without breaking existing ones.

At first, our reaction was the same as many programmers; "Oh my god what have they done and why have they done it like this?!"

Turns out, the company was on the brink of extinction, had about two months of runway left and made this Hail Mary project to attract some new attention and eventually landed them new funding.

So the project was rushed, a lot, but that's OK, but if they didn't rush and wrote super shitty code, the company wouldn't have existed at all. They were OK with this, because they traded "existing today" for "refactoring in the future", which sometimes is the right call to do.