TL; DR:
Greenfield Dreams
Every developer, at some point in their career, has imagined the thrill of starting something brand new.
- A clean slate.
- No legacy code.
- No half-baked patterns from someone long gone.
- Just you, your keyboard, maybe your favorite LLM and agent tools.
- ... And infinite potential.
Then reality hits.
You join a company, and instead of greenfield projects, you’re working in a massive, existing codebase. You’re reading other people’s code. You’re patching bugs, writing migrations, and adding features to systems you didn’t design.
Suddenly, you’re asking yourself: "Am I just maintaining and extending this existing system? Is this what software engineering really is?"
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