To be honest, most of these things can happen for poorly documented large codebase. I work on academic research project that have docs that tells you basically that the code is self documented. And give one or two pages about configuring CMake and build the project and another page on how to benchmark the throughout. But the internal quirks and the expected convention you will need to figure it on your own.
New people contributing usually reinvent many things and change global configuration because they don't know they can use something already there.
Ironically indexing the codebase and ask LLM questions about specific things is the best thing you can do. Because the only 3 people who you can ask left the project or are busy and will reply within a week.
New people contributing usually reinvent many things and change global configuration because they don't know they can use something already there.
Ironically indexing the codebase and ask LLM questions about specific things is the best thing you can do. Because the only 3 people who you can ask left the project or are busy and will reply within a week.