Legacy Archaeology
Part of the Vibe Coding: Advanced Engineering course
Handing a model a codebase nobody understands and asking "what does this do?" is one of the highest-value things you can do with it, and one of the easiest to do badly. The model will always produce an answer. It will be fluent, structured, and plausible, and you have no way to tell a correct explanation from a confident invention unless you arrive with facts of your own. This lesson is about arriving with facts.
Your workspace has legacy_billing.py: no tests, comments from 2017, a flag nobody remembers, and a warning to ask someone who left the company. Do not read it yet, and do not paste it into anything yet. ...
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Start this lessonLegacy ArchaeologyWhat you'll learn
- Facts before narrative when mapping unfamiliar code
- Characterization tests that pin current behavior
- Distinguishing intent from accident in old code
- Using a model to generate hypotheses, not conclusions
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All lessons in this course
12 lessons- 1Context Is The Whole Game35 min
- 2Pick The Right Brain, Pay The Right Price25 min
- 3Spec-Driven Development35 min
- 4Build Your Harness35 min
- 5Verification Loops: Make It Prove Itself40 min
- 6Reading Generated Code Like A Senior40 min
- 7Legacy Archaeology40 min
- 8Migrations At Scale40 min
- 9Debugging Code You Did Not Write40 min
- 10The Security Model Of An Agent40 min
- 11AI On A Team30 min
- 12Judgment: Knowing When Not To35 min
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