I think the most important takeaway is that it takes time for these problems to manifest. If you start with a particularly coherent codebase it will take years for slop code to degrade it to a point where engineers are noticeably less productive.
I didn't downvote you, but if I had to guess why you were downvoted it's because it's very obvious to many working software engineers that decoherence is a real problem. In many ways that's what this OP was all about; not just loss of joy in programming for its own sake but loss of the ability to design deterministic, fully-understood systems that won't require constant off-the-books maintenance eating into your free time.
1. The Decoherence Trap: https://maevyn.codes/decoherence 2. SlopCodeBench, a benchmark that quantifies how models decohere over repeated change requests rather than a single one-shot challenge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50108717
I think the most important takeaway is that it takes time for these problems to manifest. If you start with a particularly coherent codebase it will take years for slop code to degrade it to a point where engineers are noticeably less productive.
I didn't downvote you, but if I had to guess why you were downvoted it's because it's very obvious to many working software engineers that decoherence is a real problem. In many ways that's what this OP was all about; not just loss of joy in programming for its own sake but loss of the ability to design deterministic, fully-understood systems that won't require constant off-the-books maintenance eating into your free time.