And that's to say nothing of the fact that the programs we build exist in an ecosystem of other programs, and sometimes you're lucky if you even have a copy of

And that's to say nothing of the fact that the programs we build exist in an ecosystem of other programs, and sometimes you're lucky if you even have a copy of the source available... And that's without mentioning that it's all networked and you're dependent on other systems all the way down. So much of the work I do today is black box debugging where I can only make broad assumptions about the behavior of systems that are distant to my own based on their past performance, based on some notes someone took from a meeting 6 months ago, based on what the engineers on that team believe their systems are doing, etc... A lot of times at work, support teams modify their systems and don't bother communicating what they're doing, they seem to rely on scream tests to figure out who is even using their services and for what purpose. It's a total fucking mess and I laugh whenever I hear someone suggest that "AI" is going to replace what I do when some massive % of what I do has fucking nothing to do with code at all.