Yesterday a friend of mine sent me Geoffrey’s video. I think, but am not really sure, that he tries to sell the future of software development. Or what is it one needs to be a SWE in 2026. I find this very intriguing at first. He spoke of Ralphing, which I haven’t heard up to that point. And again, without consideration I started thinking “is this guy right?”. Read some more about Ralph later on. Then I slept on it and realized this is another FOMO driven cult personality. Now, I’m not arguing against the capabilities of LLM. They have changed the way I work. However, the more I think about Geoff’s video. The more I realize it has the classic divisive rhetoric of “US vs THEM” with that FOMO sprinkled on top.
When dealing with legacy codebases (as defined in Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers), ie. ones without tests or checks, it might feel overwhelming to start. In this blog post I’ll try and outline my method for dealing with this.
My main motto here, as the title might suggest, is “progress over perfection”. While it might be tempting to try and hit 100% code coverage straight away, as well as cover all the supported use-cases. This is a fool’s errand. You will spend incredible amounts of time designing the test suit and mapping the whole repository. On large code bases, this might not even be feasible, as others are likely working on it. So before you can map the whole codebase and it’s use-cases, things will have changed and previous facts might no longer hold true.