In my experience, inefficient code is rarely the issue outside of data engineering type ETL jobs. It’s mostly architectural. Inefficient code isn’t the reason your login is taking 30 seconds. Yes I know at Amazon/AWS scale (former employee) every efficiency matters. But even at Salesforce scale, ringing out every bit of efficiency doesn’t matter.

No one cares about handcrafted artisanal code as long as it meets both functional and non functional requirements. The minute geeks get over themselves thinking they are some type of artists, the happier they will be.

I’ve had a job that requires coding for 30 years and before ther I was hobbyist and I’ve worked for from everything from 60 person startups to BigTech.

For my last two projects (consulting) and my current project, while I led the project, got the requirements, designed the architecture from an empty AWS account (yes using IAC) and delivered it. I didn’t look at a line of code. I verified the functional and non functional requirements, wrote the hand off documentation etc.

The customer is happy, my company is happy, and I bet you not a single person will ever look at a line of code I wrote. If they do get a developer to take it over, the developer will be grateful for my detailed AGENTS.md file.