That doesn't seem like a good idea because then your code quickly turns into a hot mess if you ever have to change where stuff lives. It doesn't turn into a me

That doesn't seem like a good idea because then your code quickly turns into a hot mess if you ever have to change where stuff lives. It doesn't turn into a mess if you handle it correctly from the start. The way we ususally handle this in large applications is to have one single class like 'ApplicationPaths' which internally figures out all paths needed. No other code uses paths directly, instead always uses paths relative to ApplicationPaths.AppConfigDir/ApplicationPaths.UserConfigDir/ApplicationPaths.ExecutableDir and so on.