Bad code is kudzu | Hacker News Reader

Bad code is kudzu

vickiboykis.com

65 pointssurprisetalk20 comments

I’d argue Kudzu has visibility bias. It grows on sunny roadsides, railway corridors, and disturbed land. Basically all the places where people see it so attribute it to being more pervasive than it is. It's also mostly harmless[2].

Bad code is the inverse. It’s more pervasive than people think it is and builds up precisely in the places that are not disturbed. More like Privet than Kudzu. But that isn’t nearly as catchy.

If you want to dig into the quasi redemption story of why Kudzu isn’t this terrible evil we’ve given it to this was a decent episode of 99%PI at around the 18 minute mark[1].

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/roman-mars-describes-...

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/true-story-kud...

This description feels like you are describing mold. It is invisible. It smells bad. And can slowly erode everything it grows on. One day you will take a shovel with molded handle and it will just detach.

Don't discount disturbed land. Early successional habitat is even more biodiverse than old growth forests, and high quality early successional habitat is very rare in the south.

Bad code as an invasive species is the freshest take I've heard. I have a hard enough time arguing with people that tech debt isn't about bad code, but shifting priorities and requirements. This is going to be a really useful analogy for me going forward, thanks!

FWIW, I've seen the flip-side as well; solid coding patterns are easy for a person (or an LLM) to copy. To abuse the analogy a bit, your gardeners are happy copying whatever happens to be there, bad code will dominate that process unless actively removed, and the exponential nature of that arrangement favours removing trash code (weeds) early, much earlier than you might otherwise think.

The hardware auto-detection tool in Red Hat Linux was also called Kudzu, before udev times: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Features/NoMoreKudzu

THANK YOU! I couldn't figure out why this word was so familiar to me while reading the article.

I thought we solved the kudzu problem by having goats graze on them and rip them out by the roots, right? So maybe we should set goats on legacy git repos as well.

I will now refer to senior engineers with a bone to pick with a codebase as “hungry goats”.

Coincidentally, the same plant in Japanese is kuzu (クズ, or 葛), which shares the same pronunciation as the word for trash (屑). So bad code is trash.

> as a way to combat soil erosion

I heard it differently. I heard that it was imported for aesthetic reasons (like starlings).

Nasty stuff. We're starting to see it up here, in New York. I remember it well, from Maryland.

Yay climate change!

I often "hit the reset button" on projects. It used to be waiting until the pain was great enough, but LLMs make it a lot easier.

I’ve heard similar.

The other thing is that its coverage estimation was off by at least an order of magnitude. It is a transition zone species. So they cover trees that are at the perimeter of forests or stands along highways. Back in the 70s aerial estimations were not as good as today’s. Their visual extrapolations were thus way, way off. It’s still a pest but it’s not “swallowing the South”.

The article abridged the history too much. It was first imported as an exhibition of plants from Japan in 1876. It's usefulness as a ground cover in the US was understood later, and in the 1930s (Dust Bowl times) the USDA advocated farmers intentionally plant it as a way to hold down the soil. After that, you might say, it far exceeded its usefulness as a ground cover.

This can be very interesting- take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_mantegazzianum for example. A nice tall beautifuly flowering plant suitable for the hard environment of the Caucasus, for hundreds of years a rarity grown in a few aristocratic gardens in Europe.

Then times changed, many of those gardens were no longer maintained, regular people found those nice plans & started passing seeds and planting them to their own gardens.

Turns out the nice plan comes right out of hell, prospers in European climate, if you cut it the sap is extremely caustic & will give you painful blisters from a single drop. If you survive cutting it down (in some places it creates impenetrable grooves) it just regrow ls from the root, multiple times.

So yeah, nice new plans showing up can cause a lot of fun. Well, at least as long as they don't walk its fine...

This is a wonderful analogy.

The real analogy here is that you have to like deleting code. Carp and kudzu have few predators in asia too... except for the humans who enjoy eating them.

People eat kudzu?

Somewhere, there’s a kudzu recipe book.

I think the roots are quite good.

The cost of the code should be weighed against its benefits; at design review, code review, and launch review.

Funny. I had a similar thought but instead of bad code, I was thinking of AI slop content.

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