Legacy Code — Inherit a Codebase Nobody Wants
You inherit an undocumented system. Twelve decisions, four numbers, nine endings — a short narrative game about tech debt, trust and burnout.
Loading your run…
How it works
You have just inherited a codebase nobody else wanted: no documentation, no tests worth the name, and a deploy process that lives on a wiki page. Twelve situations come at you, three choices each, and none of them is the right answer — fixing things properly costs sanity, shipping fast costs debt, and pushing back costs trust. Run out of any of them and the run ends early. Twelve situations are drawn from a pool of 24, so no two runs tell the same story, and the run number lives in the URL: send it to someone and they play the exact run you did.
A game, not career advice. The situations are exaggerated for effect — though most working engineers will recognise more of them than they would like.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a way to win?
There are nine endings and no score to max out. The best of them, "You Left It Better Than You Found It", needs low debt, high trust, enough sanity left and real delivery all at once — it is reachable with careful play on most runs, and on some runs it is not reachable at all. That is deliberate.
What do the four numbers mean?
Sanity is what the work costs you. Trust is how much the team and your manager believe you. Tech debt is what you are sitting on. Shipped is what the business actually sees. Sanity or trust hitting zero, or debt hitting 100, ends the run there.
Can I replay someone else’s run?
Yes. Every run has a number and it is in the URL — open the same ?run= link and you get exactly the same twelve situations in the same order, so you can compare choices with someone else.
How is the score calculated?
Shipped × 10, plus sanity, plus trust, plus whatever tech debt you did not accumulate (100 − debt). Shipping is weighted heaviest because it is the only thing the business ever sees, and the debt term means a high score really does require leaving the codebase in a decent state.