> Why are we not paying it off? I sure am. I refactor code left and right. It is up to you.
Do you work alone i presume? Everyone now is engineer. In my department, even managers are "writing code". Producing thousand of lines of ansible code, that nobody can review, with multiple lines of doc that nobody will read. It is just a mess.
That's a management problem. If you can't stop non-coders from coding perhaps you can introduce an AI reviewer to take a load off, demand that they be able to defend every line of code, and put them all on pager duty, since they're coders now ;)
i've been told that it's totally fine because once the codebase turns into spaghetti you can simply tell the agent to refactor it and then everything will be ok
I know this is a tongue-in-cheek response, but this brings me great pain. The spaghetti begins quickly, and your unit/functional tests won't help you unless you hammered out your module API seams before you even began. Oh, your abstractions are leaking? Your modules know too much about each other? Multiply the spaghetti!