Like a gardener, I tread careful steps across the codebase and inspect each tree. Code rot and disease spreads widely these days. It’s the cost of the fertiliser that we use that we do not understand our own trees anymore. The bark sags underneath the thick overgrowth. Trees didn’t use to grow this fast. It used to take a team of gardeners days or weeks what one can now do in a day. Our jobs change, we adapt, just as the trees go more numerous and taller than ever, we become caretakers of grounds, of little forests.
Our jobs is no longer the pruning of leaves or the careful turning of branches, but the more distant management. There is no time to code like we used to, the careful pruner cannot compete with the forester. Disease is rampant. That is not to say it did not exist before, it certainly did. But it was more contained, more hidden.
Now all I have to do is look at a growing tree in a corner to see unmoderated timeouts, unnecessary semaphores and thread pools. Gnarly branches and rotten bark. But it is not all bad, thankfully care is all it takes to mostly keep it in check. That is our job now. Gardeners in charge of a forest. Maybe the next model release will be the one.