I have recently started to recognize this pattern of idle development in some very well known software projects.
What happens is this.
At a certain time the team delivered a perfect version. So perfect that nothing is needed to be refactored or added to it. It's done. Then the team immediately gets bored. In order to protect job security, the team invents new work for themselves, a huge architecture refactoring, that sort of things. Sure, why not, we have time and resource, reduce technical debt, etc.
A couple years go by and now the product is a rotten swollen mess with tons of useless verbose documentation, tons of integrations, a mind-boggling number of features and, of course, AI. And the product cannot even perform its original task because that was abstracted away a long ago.
Not gonna point fingers, because I'm gonna immediately get downvoted to hell. But we all know examples of that taking place.
What happens is this.
At a certain time the team delivered a perfect version. So perfect that nothing is needed to be refactored or added to it. It's done. Then the team immediately gets bored. In order to protect job security, the team invents new work for themselves, a huge architecture refactoring, that sort of things. Sure, why not, we have time and resource, reduce technical debt, etc.
A couple years go by and now the product is a rotten swollen mess with tons of useless verbose documentation, tons of integrations, a mind-boggling number of features and, of course, AI. And the product cannot even perform its original task because that was abstracted away a long ago.
Not gonna point fingers, because I'm gonna immediately get downvoted to hell. But we all know examples of that taking place.