In Defense of Not Understanding Your Codebase

Sean Goedecke argues that fully understanding your codebase is a small-team luxury. In large systems nobody understands it all, and effective engineers work from partly correct theories, making educated guesses and dealing with the consequences. He frames “pure” engineering (small codebases, complete understanding) and “impure” engineering (large systems, partial models) as different professional cultures, and treats understanding as one value to trade off among many, like performance or compliance.

A useful counterweight to cognitive debt: if full cognitive coverage was never on offer at scale, agents are not taking away something we actually had. Uncle Bob’s gauntlet of constraints is one way of living with that.