> far less performant code than the one before it.

That worked because of rapid advancements in CPU performance. We’ve left that era.

It’s about more than performance. Code is and always has been a liability. Even with agents, you start seeing massive slowdowns with code base size.

It’s why I can nearly one shot a simple game for my kid in 20 minutes with Claude, but using it at work on our massive legacy codebase is only marginally faster than doing it by hand.