Overwhelming Codebases

It’s overwhelming.

I’m someone who finds code in huge projects overwhelming.

Understanding what the people before you have written down. The kind of complexity that would be embedded this codebase. Every line of it must be battle tested, and I have to add new code to it! NOOOOOOOO!

There has to be a way to do it right!? I just need proper documentation that people before me have written down. I’d be good to go. You think.

All you get are, some useful comments here and there. A doc which hasn’t been updated in a few months.

But none of the code today looks like or works like what you can see written in the docs.

It’s crazy. Adding to the feeling when you’ve just joined the company, and you’re already as overwhelmed as you thought you could ever be.

Or maybe that’s just me.

EDIT: I wrote this one day thinking of building a product to help people understand codebases, then AI happened.