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First job out of college was some nonsense webapp that they ported from php to Java not by rewriting but by building a Java based PHP engine. Instead of cordoning that and migrating to a proper MVC framework they instead used PHP as the view layer, with a hash table as the model.

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Credit card bank that logged unredacted credit applications with full PII because it was otherwise too difficult to debug production. They also never ran their test suite because the mainframe provider charged per transaction for the test instance.

Home lender who bought the source code of a vendors refi platform only to find out they did not buy the database. We reverse engineered that hunk of shit for over a year. Vendor had a classic "broken back button" issue that they fixed by providing a patched version of IE with back button disabled.

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That credit card company was also fun because they had a directory of several thousand "landing pages" all managed by a single design guy whos whole process was just copy the latest and make some changes. Sourdough starter of HTML deeply coupled to the database schema.

Anyways this is why I can only laugh when I hear someone say "agents cant write production code" or "every line must be human reviewed". Yeah sure man that's been working out great so far.

Daaayum I've been hearing stories like these for years and personally seen some crazy stuff in prod in my time. It always felt to me like the internet was held together by duct tape and spit. Hard to do worse TBH.