This is getting aggressively flagged (last attempt to discuss this article: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42972899">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42972899</a>)<p>However I'd like discuss an aspect of it that I haven't seen mentioned before:<p>How unpleasant is it for a developer to write code for ancient systems day-to-day, systems like the ones DOGE is blitzing now? (I've never had the misfortune of working on a 50 year old codebase.) I imagine it takes quite a while to get familiar with it, and the DOGE team is probably only working with a surface understanding. Maybe they aren't even trying to work within the code codebase and deployments. Certainly not with an eye for future maintenance. Would future delveopers' productivity be made materially worse if someone had, say, hurriedly proxied some part of the system through nginx to crudely hack certain API calls?<p>Regardless of whether the DOGE work is legal or with honest intentions, won't this mad dash of changes potentially make all future development on these even more burdensome?