There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get

The author recounts working on Amazon’s order-processing codebase, which grew into an incomprehensible, inter-team monolith riddled with undocumented business rules and “haunted graveyards” of legacy code. Repeated attempts to refactor failed because each fix required new hires, incomplete knowledge, and short-term political pressures, leaving the system perpetually bloated and unsustainable.