Codebase

Raised as a usability problem by 11 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2009–2025), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with Codebase, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 11 complaints

Developers must keep two query libraries in mind when working on one codebase2025-12-29
Joke-named functions and flags are confusing and force readers to decode meaning2025-06-16
Code is hard to explore and understand, with no comments or docs, forcing archaeology to work with it2024-10-18
Logic spread across many tiny functions, so the whole procedure can't be read at once2024-08-07
Hard to read code when logic is scattered across many tiny files2022-07-25
Must bounce through many files to follow calls and dependency setup2022-01-28
End users must memorize 10 workarounds for bad system states caused by out-of-sync copies2022-01-05
Labels too small, so zooming and panning loses context2021-08-06
Page becomes impossible to scroll past a full screen graph2021-08-06
Adding features requires editing dozens of files due to circular dependencies and singletons2021-01-16
Pushed commits take very long to appear in the web interface2009-12-06