Who Else Has Inherited a Codebase With Zero Comments and a Prayer?

Okay so. Story time. Grab a coffee; this one's got a body count.

A few months back I got assigned a "small fix" on a payment reconciliation service. Small fix. That's what the ticket said. I need that on record before I tell you what happened next, because I want you to fully feel how personally I take that betrayal.

First file I open has a function called handlePayment2. Not handlePaymentV2. Not handlePaymentUpdated. Just 2. Like someone typed it out, looked at it, and thought, "Yeah, that's a professional software artifact," and then went to lunch. And it's sitting right next to handlePayment, which is STILL being called in three other places. Nobody deleted the original. It's just there. Both of them. Living together. Co-parenting the payment flow like a divorced couple who still share a group chat.

Zero comments anywhere in the file. Not one. I scrolled 400 lines and found exactly one piece of human text in the whole thing: // TODO fix this, dated 2022. Fix what. FIX WHAT, my guy. That's not a comment, that's a cry for help mailed to nobody.

This is when I realized the whole ordeal was giving me full Death Note energy — except instead of L calmly deducing a serial killer's identity from crumbs of evidence, it was just me, at 11pm, trying to deduce why a boolean exists using nothing but vibes and rage.