And in my experience, these are _dangerous_. People go into "while we're at it..." mode, and it quickly turns into a big 2.0 kind of thing that takes forever.
I would argue that LLMs can speed this kind of thing up, but not by an order of magnitude or anything, just a bit. Unless there's high risk appetite.
Building products that no one really knows the internals of is crazy to me, and the methods people have of trying to mitigate that problem seem half assed at best
We have some and sometimes marketing comes back with some extra revenue from a partner if we build out feature X Y or Z for their new product launch. The contracts are signed so engineering has to do it or we’re blamed for lost revenue.
A few of those a year and you eventually end up in a similar situation.
If I didn't work on such a team, I would last exactly as long as it took me to find such a team.
Depends on what you mean by underlying issues. If you're in a regulated environment, it may be such a mountain of red tape to change behavior that it's not worth it, even if you know it's not ideal.
But if the underlying issues are tech debt, bad design, and other things invisible to the outside world, that's different.
Of course it won't quite work, but I can definitely see why some people would want that.
Incidentally, Whenever i've done this in the past it's had a pleasant side effect of improving architecture. You end up forcing something akin to "push for's down and pull if's up" because crossing the ffi boundary is not free. It can be quite magical, as in leading to comically unbelievably speed ups when you also take advantage of vector intrinsics.