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I’ve Seen This Architecture Before. It Ends in Tears.

AI Summary4 min read

TL;DR

Senior developers warn that temporary fixes become permanent, rewrites often fail, and over-engineering with microservices or AI adds complexity. The key skill is saying 'no' to prevent legacy systems and prioritize survivability over speed.

Key Takeaways

  • •Temporary solutions often become core infrastructure, leading to unmaintainable systems that no one wants to touch.
  • •Rewrites can double bugs by creating two systems, and microservices may overcomplicate small-scale applications.
  • •Senior developers focus on survivability, asking 'What happens when this fails?' and saying 'no' to unnecessary complexity.
  • •Production incidents often stem from simple issues like cron jobs, highlighting the importance of basic checks over quick fixes.
  • •Shipping less code and preventing complexity is more valuable than building it, a key realization in senior roles.

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I’ve been writing software long enough to know one eternal truth:

Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.

The “Quick Fix” That Became Core Infrastructure

You know this story.

You add:

// TODO: replace with proper solution later
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That was 2019.

It’s now handling 38% of company revenue.

Nobody knows how it works.
Nobody wants to touch it.
It has achieved sentience.

The Rewrite Cycle (Senior Edition)

Every few years, a brave soul says:

“We should rewrite this properly.”

The room nods.

The juniors look inspired.
The mid-levels look ambitious.
The seniors look tired.

Because seniors know the stages:

  1. Excitement
  2. Overconfidence
  3. Underestimation
  4. Scope explosion
  5. “Let’s just integrate with the old system for now”
  6. Now you have two systems

Congratulations.
You’ve doubled your bugs.

The Microservices Enlightenment

At some point someone discovered:

  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Apache Kafka

And thought:

“Yes. This is what our 4-person startup needs.”

For 2,000 users.

With one database.

Running on a single VM.

But now we have:

  • 14 services
  • 6 CI pipelines
  • 1 engineer who understands networking
  • 0 engineers who sleep peacefully

The Senior Developer Starter Pack

You know you’ve been around too long when:

  • You measure architecture decisions in “future therapy sessions.”
  • You get nervous when someone says “Let’s innovate.”
  • You trust the boring stack.
  • You ask, “What happens when this fails?” before asking, “How fast is it?”

Juniors optimize for speed.
Mid-levels optimize for elegance.
Seniors optimize for survivability.

The 3AM Production Incident

Nothing bonds engineers like:

CPU: 100%
Memory: gone
Logs: silent
Slack: exploding
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Someone suggests scaling horizontally.

Someone suggests clearing cache.

Someone suggests rewriting in Go.

The senior quietly says:

“Did anyone check the cron job?”

It was the cron job.

It’s always the cron job.

The AI Era

Now we have AI generating code.

Which is fantastic.

Because now instead of debugging:

  • Your mistakes

You debug:

  • Your mistakes
  • The model’s mistakes
  • And the interaction between both

Progress.

“We’ll Clean It Up Later”

This sentence has built more legacy systems than COBOL.

Every system starts clean.

Then comes:

  • A hotfix
  • A deadline
  • A “temporary” flag
  • A feature request from sales

And suddenly your elegant architecture looks like it lost a bar fight.

The Hidden Senior Skill

After 15+ years, your real superpower isn’t coding.

It’s saying:

“No.”

No, we don’t need microservices.
No, we don’t need a rewrite.
No, we don’t need 6 new dependencies.
No, we don’t need real-time event streaming for user profile edits.

The ability to prevent complexity is worth more than the ability to build it.

But nobody puts that on LinkedIn.

The Real Promotion

The moment you become senior isn’t when you:

  • Master a framework
  • Learn a new language
  • Ship a big feature

It’s when you realize:

Shipping less code is often the most responsible thing you can do.

And if you’ve ever:

  • Commented out code instead of deleting it
  • Whispered “please work” before hitting deploy
  • Added logging and called it observability
  • Or said “it’s a small change” in a meeting

You’re one of us.

Welcome.

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