Heard a senior dev say 'copy paste is faster than typing' and it broke my brain

They actually argued that memorizing syntax is a waste of time when you can just grab code from old projects. I get it for boilerplate but they copy pasted a whole login system into a calculator app and it somehow still worked - has anyone else seen this kind of shortcut go horribly right or wrong?

2 comments

2 Comments

hayden7091mo ago

My old boss had this massive folder called "Code Graveyard" with like 200 files from past projects. One time he copy pasted an entire PDF generator function into a simple checkout page because he "remembered it worked before." The thing generated a receipt that looked like a ransom note with random font sizes and images embedded in weird places. Customer emails lit up for a week but nobody could figure out how to fix it so they just left it that way. The code is probably still running somewhere in that app.

the_patricia1mo ago

Ngl, that story is funny but I'm not sure it's as bad as you're making it sound. Like yeah the receipts looked ridiculous, but if nobody could figure out how to fix it and customers still got their orders, maybe it was just a weird quirk that people got used to. Honestly I've seen way worse in production code. That one time a friend of mine worked at a company where their entire payment system ran on a single file with 15,000 lines of PHP and it processed millions in revenue each month before anyone touched it. Tbh your old boss probably just needed to get a feature out the door and went with what he knew. It's not like the app crashed or lost data - just made some ugly PDFs. People get too dramatic about code quality sometimes.