[bumbledraven]

800-word response by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lucovsky, who was on the team that built Windows NT: https://nitter.net/marklucovsky/status/2052828852490285390#m.

It begins:

> In David Crawshaw’s recent post “The agent principal-agent problem” there’s a lot of insight beneath the headline “Code review is broken.” Worth reading carefully.

> Toward the end, David reflects on what he calls the old “cowboy” development culture at Microsoft in the 80s/90s. Not much has been written about that era, mostly because there was no social media, no laptops everywhere, no phones recording daily engineering life.

> A few thoughts from someone who lived it.

Conclusion:

> A lot of software quality did not come from pre-commit review gates.

> It came from tight teams, deep ownership, brutal integration pressure, system-wide stress, and developers who fully understood the machinery they were standing on.