One rebuttal to that is that with the benefit of hindsight, to a first approximation zero percent of the code I've written in my career turned out to be "of any significance" really.

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marcus_holmes 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Same. That line about "your legacy is your family and friends" hit hard.

I've been coding professionally for >30 years. I don't think any of my code has survived 5 years in production.

I don't think code quality affected that at all - I know the really, really, shitty code I wrote when learning OOP in the 90's survived for a looong time, while the amazing code I wrote for a startup 2018-2021 died with it.

	▲	girvo 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		One of the projects I'm most proud of is still running ten years later, and has processed over a billion AUD through it in that time, with very minimal maintenance. I recently consulted on it, and sure enough it's still ticking along nicely! The code is honestly quite good too, even if it is PHP (though in a very nice microframework we wrote on top of Silex: removed all magic that a lot of these systems relied on. No annotations!)
	▲	jamesfinlayson 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I haven't doing this forever (only 10+ years) but surprisingly I think a majority of what I've written is still running. Probably a fair bit will continue to run for a while yet too I think (again, surprising for CRUD web apps).

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YZF 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most code I wrote over my career got pretty decent use and produced value for customers. Some was used by millions of people. What I work on today is used by thousands. It's important that it is of reasonable quality with less bugs, decent performance, functionality users are looking for etc.

A lot of code makes a difference but I guess there's a lot that doesn't?

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blast0ff 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Please elaborate

	▲	bigiain 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'd guess, on average, code I've written has a half-life of maybe 3 or 4 years. There's pretty much none of my code (with a few surprising exceptions) that's still been running or in production anywhere for more than 8 or 10 years. At the time, a lot of it felt "important" and "significant". And some of it probably was at the time, to the businesses I wrote it for. But whether I sweated blood and tears to craft the most elegant and efficient software I was capable of, or I phoned it in and just copy/pasted Stack Overflow answers together until I met some interpretations of a requirement to be able to leave the office on time - really made no difference. I've been pondering lately, thinking about GenAI and vibe coding, with the very real risk of creating completely unmaintainable codebases - whether that matters, if the code is likely to be retired or rewritten in 3-4 years anyway? My current gig is on to the 4th rewrite of it's web/mobile app backend platform in 15 years, which started out as a Groovy on Grails app, which got rewritten in Java, then rewritten again in Java, and now it's being rewritten in Python. Each rewrite had fairly good reasons at the time, but a huge amount of code here gets thrown away every 4 years or so - which looking back makes me seriously question whether any of it was "of any significance". To be honest, the 2026 Python code really isn't doing anything notably different or more complex than the Perl and JavaScript code I was writing in 1996 - web work is CRUD apps all the way down.